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THE CHILDREN OF THE PLANETS:
FREEDOM, NECESSITY, AND THE IMPACT OF THE STARS –
THE ICONOGRAPHIC DIMENSIONS OF A PAN-EUROPEAN
EARLY MODERN DISCOURSE
By
Breanne Herrera
Submitted to
Central European University
History Department
In partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of
Master of Arts
Supervisor: Professor Matthias Riedl
Second Reader: Professor György Szőnyi
Budapest, Hungary
2012
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Copyright in the text of this thesis rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in
full or part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and
lodged in the Central European Library. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This
page must form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with
such instructions may not be made without the written permission of the Author.
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ABSTRACT
The “Children of the Planets” is an astrological visual motif that depicts the seven planets as
personified deities along side their ‘planet children’ who are generally seen as smaller
persons below the planet representing the influences and activities associated with each
planet. The iconography of the planets themselves can be traced to the 12th
century, but we
do not see the additional characters, the children, that define this motif, until the 14th
century
in fresco imagery and not until the beginning of the 15th
century in manuscript illumination.
This interesting development in depictions of the planets, from the 12th
to the 15th
century,
highlights a shift in the perception and understanding of astrology that culminated in the
early modern period. The many Renaissance prints that display this motif are witnesses to
the popularity of a new perception of astrology. The purpose of this thesis is not only to
retrace the history and development of this motif – to answer some questions about the
provenance and meaning of the motif that have never fully been answered – but also to
show how as a concept the ‘children of the planets’ represents a development in the
philosophy of the early modern period. The Children of the Planets depict a new model in
astrological thinking, a development brought on by a synthesis of ideas occurring in the
transmission stories of different texts and images.
The Children of the Planets fit into a broader conceptual framework where we can
look at some of the intellectual trends in the fifteenth century. The humanists of this time
period, like Marsilio Ficino, give us insight into some of the reasons we find these
interactions, of religious, astrological, medicinal, and everyday life, in early prints. In the
discussion in our first chapter, we find in Ficino’s writings the first use of the term prisca
theologia. The idea of a ‘natural religion,’ the idea that the divine is common to all, can be
seen in many literatures during this time. This is the way of thinking that was informing the
genres of early printing that the Children of the Planets find a venue in. As Ficino himself
tried to harmonize Christian theology with Platonic philosophy and Ptolemaic astrology, so
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does our motif. The De vita libri tres can be seen as a complex example in the genre we will
define throughout this essay, of works dedicated to the ‘good’ way of living through
practical approaches toward the acquiring knowledge of the world through right action in
everyday life. The manuscripts and prints containing the Children of the Planets are another
example. These works provide guidelines for how to approach subjects in philosophy,
theology, and health, those topics that readers would find useful and beneficial in their daily
lives.
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Table of Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ........................................................................................................................ VII
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................. 1
I. THE MOTIF AS A TOOL............................................................................................................................. 5
II. EXAMPLES .................................................................................................................................................. 6
III. FRITZ SAXL AND THE SURROUNDING SCHOLARSHIP ............................................................... 8
IV. TREATISE ON THE SEVEN PLANETS: THE CHILDREN OF THE PLANETS IN THE ........... 12
FRAMEWORK OF PTOLEMAIC ASTROLOGY...................................................................................... 13
CHAPTER 1 ................................................................................................................................................... 20
“BEING A PLANET’S CHILD BY CHOICE” ............................................................................................. 20
I. CASSIRER AND HIS TREATMENT OF FICINO’S ASTROLOGICAL SOLUTION: ...................... 21
FINDING FREE WILL IN DIVINE WILL .................................................................................................. 21
II. AUGUSTINE ON FORTUNA AND FELICITAS .................................................................................. 23
III. FICINO’S DE VITA COELITUS COMPARANDA AND THE PICATRIX ......................................... 27
IV. THE PERFECTION OF THE SELF AND ‘PERFECT NATURE’ ..................................................... 32
V. PRISCA THEOLOGIA AND PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS .................................................................... 36
VI. PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA’S DE HOMNIS DIGNITATE ................................................................ 39
CHAPTER 2 ................................................................................................................................................... 44
THE CHILDREN OF THE PLANETS IN MANUSCRIPTS ..................................................................... 44
I. THE HERITAGE OF MANUSCRIPTS AND THE CONTEXTS OF THE IMAGES ......................... 50
II. KITĀB AL-BULHĀN ................................................................................................................................. 53
III. THE CHILDREN OF THE PLANETS: SURVEY OF EUROPEAN MANUSCRIPTS.................... 61
IV. KRAKÓW PICATRIX ............................................................................................................................. 70
CHAPTER 3 ................................................................................................................................................... 75
‘HOUSEBOOKS’ IN THE TRANSITION FROM MANUSCRIPT TO PRINT IN 15TH CENTURY EUROPE ......................................................................................................................................................... 75
I. CONTEXT OF BLOCK-BOOKS AND WOODBLOCK PRINTS ........................................................ 77
II. THE CALENDAR IN PRINTS ................................................................................................................ 82
III. THE CHILDREN OF THE PLANETS – SCIENTIFIC, RELIGIOUS, AND MAGICAL ................. 84
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................ 88
“THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANET CHILDREN” .................................................................................. 88
BIBLIOGRAPHIES ....................................................................................................................................... 94
MANUSCRIPTS ............................................................................................................................................. 94
15TH C. SCOTUS. LIBER INTRODUCTORIUS. OXFORD. MS BODL. 266. OXFORD ..................... 94
EARLY PRINTS ............................................................................................................................................. 95
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CITED WORKS ............................................................................................................................................. 96
ILLUSTRATIONS .......................................................................................................................................102
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Luna and Children, 1480 Housebook (Waldburg Wolfegg/ Rijksmuseum Amsterdam).
Photographs by Breanne Herrera, courtesy of Warburg Library.
2. Jupiter and Children, ibid.
3. Saturn text, ibid.
4. Saturn and Children, ibid.
5. Lover’s Garden, ibid.
6. Venus and her Children, 1460 De Sphaera (Cristoforo de Perdis) Modena. Lat. 202,
Estense. http://estense.cedoc.mo.it/info/img/i-mo-beu-alfa.x.2.14.pdf.
7. Children of Venus, ibid.
8. Mars and Children, ibid.
9. Children of Mars, ibid.
10. Mercury and Children, ibid.
11. Children of Mercury, ibid.
12. Four Jupiters, 1458 ca. Kraków Picatrix. BJ 793. Sniezynska-Stolot, Picatrix Latinus.†
13. Saturn, ibid.
14. Mercury, ibid.
15. Venus, ibid.
16. – 18. Three Mars, ibid.
19. Wheel of Seven Spirits of Mars, The ‘Spanish Picatrix,’ Mars, 13th
c. Vatican Library.
Reg. lat. 1283a. Agostino, Astromagia.†
20. Twenty Eight Moon Mansions – Luna, ibid.
21. Saturn, 16th
c. Treatise on stones (ref. Ghayat). BNF MS arabe 2775. Pingree, “Indian
Planetary Images.Ӡ
22. Jupiter, ibid.
23. Mars, Ghayat, M. Nasar. Cairo, n.d.
24. Treasure of Alexander, 14th
c. Al-Magrithi. Kitab Thakhirat al-Iskandar. MS Biblioteca
Escorial. Alfonso-Goldfarb, Livro do Tesouro.†
25. Children of the Planets, 1399. Kitāb al-Bulhān. Baghdad. Bodl. MS Or. 133. 25b, 26a.
http://www2.odl.ox.ac.uk/gsdl/cgi-bin/library
26. The Four Seasons-Summer, ibid., 44r.
27. Third Clime,’Kitāb al-Bulhān, ibid. 47v.
28. Mansions of the Moon, ibid. 27v.
29. Mansions of the Moon, 1582 Kitāb al-maṭāli‘ al-sa‘āda wa-yanābī‘ al-Sayyāda, BNF
Suppl. Turc. 242. Moliero.com.
30. Triumph of Venus, Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, Wikipedia.
31. Children of the Planets, Salone, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, Wikipedia.
32. Mars, 1582 Splendor Solis. British Museum. Harl. MS
3469.www.hermetics.org/solis.html
33. Mars, (al-amar), 1580s Falnama, H. 1703. Fol. 30b. Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul.
Farhad, Book of Omens.†
34. Celestial sphere, Saturn, ibid, fol. 17b.
35. Saturn riding Capricorn, Kitāb al-Bulhān. 19b.
36. 2nd
Decan of Pisces Jupiter, 14th
c. Astrological ms. Kitâb al-Mawali. Tabriz or
Baghdad. Keir Collection. Carboni, Following the Stars.†
37. Jupiter on Pisces, Kitāb al-Bulhān. 22b
38. 2nd
Decan of Pisces Jupiter, 14th
c. Abû Ma‘shar, Kitâb al-Mawalid. BNF arabe
2583.http://mandragore.bnf.fr/html/accueil.html
39. Descent of the Holy Ghost, 11th
c. Cod. Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek. MS Lat. 5. Saxl,
Classical Mythology.†
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40. Seven Planets and the Philosophers, Losbuch in deutschen Reimpaaren. 14th
c. Vienna,
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex vindobonensis S.N. 2652.
http://www.kettererkunst.com/details-e.php?obnr=411102918&anummer=385
41. Minerva and the Liberal Arts, Boccaccio Des cleres femmes, 1403 ca. Paris. BNF MS fr.
598, fol. 13r. Buettner, “Profane Illuminations.”
42. Children of Mercury, 1407 Christine de Pisan, Épître d’Othéa. BNF MS
fr.606.http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52000943c/f23.item
43. Sun and Children, 1455 ca. Planetenbuch. Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. Germ. 438, 149r–150v.
http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg438
44. Luna and Childrem, 1475 Kalenderbuch (Joseph of Ulm). Tübingen Library, UB M.
d..http://idb.ub.uni-tuebingn.de/diglit/Md2.
45. Luna, Boke of Astronomy and off Philosophye'. 15th
c. Oxford, Bodl. Rawl. D 1220
46. The Chilren of the Planet Saturn, 1510 Jörg Breu the Elder. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin,
Staatliche Museen. Völlnagel, “Splendor Solis.”†
47. Chilren of the Planets, 1460 Baccio Baldini ‘Children of the Planets.’ Pavia, Museo
Civico. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy.†
48. Planet Children – Moon, 1491 Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch, Regensburg. Cod. Pal.
Germ. 832, 98v-101v.http://digi.ub.uni-
heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg832/0211?sid=cf7dcff7c3af7aab9e3b6adec18b2fe5
49. Mercury and Luna, 1488 Abû Ma‘shar. Flores astrologiae. Venice, Johannes Baptista
Sessa. Courtesy of Warburg Library.
50. Decans and Paranatellonta, 15th
c. Fendulus Liber astrologiae. BNF lat. 7344.
http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/vpc/VPC_search/record.php?record=7492
51. Planet Figures, Michael Scotus, Liber intro., CLM 10268, Bayrische Staatsbibliothek,
Munich, ca. 1340. http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/vpc/VPC_search/record.php?record=17492
52. Picatrix (with Trithemius Clavis print). 1580. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Canonicianus
Latinus 500. Photography by Breanne Herrera, courtesy of Bodleian Library.
53. Picatrix (Herbal with Mandrake), ibid.
†For full citations see Bibliography.
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INTRODUCTION
The “Children of the Planets” is an astrological visual motif that depicts the seven planets as
personified deities along side their ‘planet children’ who are generally seen as smaller
persons below the planet representing the influences and activities associated with each
planet. The iconography of the planets themselves can be traced to the 12th
century,1 but we
do not see the additional characters, the children, that define this motif, until the 14th
century2 in fresco imagery and not until the beginning of the 15
th century in manuscript
illumination. This interesting development in depictions of the planets, from the 12th
to the
15th
century, highlights a shift in the perception and understanding of astrology that
culminated in the early modern period. The many Renaissance prints that display this motif
are witnesses to the popularity of a new perception of astrology. The purpose of this thesis
is not only to retrace the history and development of this motif – to answer some questions
about the provenance and meaning of the motif that have never fully been answered – but
also to show how as a concept the ‘children of the planets’ represents a development in the
philosophy of the early modern period. The Children of the Planets depict a new model in
astrological thinking, a development brought on by a synthesis of ideas occurring in the
transmission stories of different texts and images.
Something that has often led to some confusion that should be clarified is that when
speaking about the iconography of the stars we are speaking of several distinct transmission
stories. The story of the constellations is different from that of the planets and even still the
iconography of the Children of the Planets is different from both of these. The transmission
1 Dieter Blume, “Michael Scot, Giotto and the Construction of New Images of the Planets,” in vol. 14, Images
of the Pagan Gods: Papers given at a conference in memory of Jean Seznec (London: Warburg Institute
Colloquia, 2009), 129, 132. The Aratos by Germanicus (composed in 11th
c.) is the 12th
century illuminated
manuscript which Michael Scot, most likely, drew from (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid MS 19 [16]), is the
earliest series of the personified seven planets. 2 That is, in the frescos originally designed by Pietro d’Abano and painted by Giotto in the Salone of the
Palazzo della Ragione, Padua. Unfortunately this cycle of the planet children was destroyed in a fire in the 15th
century, and retouched then. They were restored again in the 18th
century after weather damage. There are 14th
century copies though, that give us some idea about what features were original. See Blume, “Michael Scot,
Giotto, and the Construction of New Images of the Planets,” 137, fn. 17.
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of the constellations has come to us from Greek sources, through the Aratea,3 and is still
recognizable from antique models today. “Images of the constellations constitute, in fact,
the only uninterrupted iconographical tradition leading from Antiquity through the Middle
Ages into the Renaissance.”4 But the iconography of the planets originated only later, in the
12th
century, when we first begin to see individual personifications of the moon, for
example, or series of the seven ‘movers’ (αστέρες πλανήτες [asteres planetes] meaning
‘wandering stars’), the five planets and the two luminaries (sun and moon).5 But these bore
little to no resemblance to the antique gods. In the 13th
century we see creations of planet
figures by individual artists, those in Georgius Fendulus’ or Michael Scot’s works. Dieter
Blume writes that the “bridge leading back to the gods of Antiquity was thus definitely
burned. Even educated readers would not have made the connection anymore. So in the
field of planetary astrology, there was in fact no survival of the pagan gods.”6 Even though
we have depictions of the gods that they are associated with in antiquity, these gods were
not combined with personifications of the celestial objects until much later in the 16th
century. As for their ‘children,’ we will see just how these developed through the course of
this thesis.
This also brings us to another point of clarification. The texts that commonly appear
along side the Children of the Planets motif are not understood to be necessarily directly
related to the motif. Rather it is thought that this motif did not originate as an illustration of
a text, but instead is an independent visual series that appears along side different texts.
There develops different traditions that place the motif next to excerpts from the
Introductorium maius and Kitāb al-Mawālīd by Abû Ma‘shar al-Balkhī (Jaʿfar ibn
3 That is the corpus of the Greek poet Aratos, third century BC.
4 Rembrandt Duits, “Reading the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” Journal of Art
Historiography 5 (2011): 10. Also, Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford:
Phaidon, 1970), 26–27. 5 As in a bronze mirror from 1153 AD, Iran. Stefano Carboni, Following the Stars: Images of the Zodiac in
Islamic Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), 6. 6 Blume, “Michael Scot, Giotto, and the Construction of New Images of the Planets,” 136. On Warburg’s
‘survivals’ see Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,”
Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 1 (2002): 59–70.
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Muḥammad al-Balkhī, 787–886 AD), in both Arabic and Latin versions, but the
illustrations of the Children of the Planets do not specifically mimic the description in the
corresponding passage. It seems that they come from an already established tradition of
planetary depictions of the professions, at least in Islamic art, but we do not have any
examples of this tradition in manuscripts before those in the Kitāb al-Bulhān (1399). The 9th
century corpus of Abû Ma‘shar, works like the Kitāb al-Mawālīd, are only illustrated later,
in the 14th
century. Still, I find what is interesting is that when his works are illustrated, that
is exactly when the Children of the Planets first appear (in the Kitāb al-Bulhān). “When it
was decided to depict these astrological powers, the appropriate images first had to be
invented. And it was not Ovid, but Abû Ma‘shar who was consulted.”7 The importance of
following the motif as both an independent work of art and as a motif that accompanies
specific texts is therefore necessary if we really want to understand how the motif first came
about.
One of the greatest difficulties I have found with my study of the Children of the
Planets is tracing the iconography of the motif as an independent artistic series, that seems
to be independent of any text, and at the same time researching the contexts in which it
appears along side certain texts. I have found that it is necessary to follow the texts in which
the motif appears in order to put together a full picture of their history. The difficulty of
tracing the motif alone, as a visual work without a text, is that there are huge gaps in the
imagery examples, and, up until the late 15th
century, very few. We can only guess at the
connection between the few examples in Islamic manuscripts and those of the Western
models. The examples we have in fresco imagery are far removed from both.8
In the introduction to the most comprehensive work on the Kitāb al-Bulhān, Stefano
Carboni’s Il Kitāb al-Bulhān di Oxford, Ernst Grube wrote about his research that “the
7 Blume, “Michael Scot, Giotto, and the Construction of New Images of the Planets,” 130.
8 For example, the frescoes of the Salone in the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, 14
th century, and the Palazzo
Schifanoia in Ferrara, c. 1470.
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recognition of the absolute necessity of an integral study of both text and accompanying
images” is an important new dimension that should not be ignored.9 Eva Baer was interested
as well in the relationship between a possible textual precedent for the Children of the
Planets in the Arabic Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Goal of the Sage),10
otherwise known as the
Picatrix (in Latin translation),11
with the images in the Kitāb al-Bulhān.12
More recently
Rembrandt Duits emphasized the puzzling impetus in Fritz Saxl’s research on the Children
of the Planets to think “in terms of a direct intercultural transmission of images rather than
of an intercultural transmission of texts with separate illustration traditions in each
culture.”13
Dieter Blume points to the need for analysis of both text and image, especially in
light of the early examples of the planets in Fendulus’s Liber astrologiae (ca. 1230s)
(extracts from Abû Ma‘shar’s Introductorium maius, 9th
century), or those created by
Michael Scot (ca. 1220s) where he formed his illustrations based on his own imagination
combined with textual details from Abû Ma‘shar. In this way the text becomes very
important, even when it does not correspond to the imagery that accompanies it exactly. The
context that it gives to the motif informs us about the immediate surroundings which are
important evidences of how the motif came to be.
Chapter 1 of this thesis will open a discussion on the implications of the
philosophical relevance of the motif in astrology of the early modern period. Chapter 2 will
follow the intercultural transmission of texts and images of the Children of the Planets and
will look at examples of the motif in order to reveal points of development within the
representations. Chapter 3 will focus on the Children of the Planets in early print and how
these were incorporated into everyday life. The introduction to this thesis will continue here
9 Stefano Carboni, Il Kitāb al-Bulhān di Oxford (Torino: Editrice Tirrenia Stampatori, 1988), 111.
10 Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner, trans., “Picatrix” Das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-Magriti (London:
The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1962). 11
The Arabic Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm was identified by Wilhelm Printz in 1920 as the original of the Latin Picatrix. 12
Eva Baer, “Representations of ‘Planet-Children’ in Turkish Manuscripts,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies 31, no. 3 (1968): 526–533. 13
Duits, “Reading the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” 6.
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with a discussion of the use of the motif, will list some of the examples we have, and will
look at the theoretical framework for the Children of the Planets in a broader astrological
context.
i. The Motif as a Tool
The early modern individual would have been acutely aware of the planet that governed the
moment of their nativity. The use of prescriptions, prayers, and formulae to induce that
planet to do well by someone accompanied what might seem a determinist discourse. But
fate and free will walked hand and hand in the most popular of the literatures of this time.
The idea of the intermediary deities of the Zodiac and planets were key to this thinking. The
Children of the Planets were often found along side popular Christian motifs. The Children
of the Planets were associated with the days of the week and served, along with the
depictions of the Zodiac and Labors of the Month, as an instructive calendar. One of the
reasons this motif was so popular, almost as widely printed as biblical motifs, was because
of its usefulness in everyday life. It functioned as a horoscope in which the planets could be
seen performing human actions, participating in human affairs. The artists of these works
were reconstructing an astrological recipe at first, and gradually incorporated scenes of
everyday life intermixed with the planet figures. The Children of the Planets gives us an
insight into a pivotal development in the frame of mind of the early modern individual
because it shows how an understanding of cosmology could be delivered to a wide audience
through images, and how this could correspond to religious practice and could be
incorporated into daily life. This phenomenon in the early modern period opens a discourse
about the intersection of astrology and theology that is informed by the histories of science,
medicine, astronomy, and religion.
My argument for the significance of the Children of the Planets, as a tool that
illustrated a new form of astrological thinking, fits into a broader thesis according to which
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the humanists saw the need for practical ways to access the divine. When ideas of
individuality and free will could potentially conflict with belief in divine will and
providence the understanding of the stars offered a way of harmony. The way of solving this
conflict, contacting a remote God, was through the use of intermediary divinities (Liberal
Arts, Fates, Fortune, Planets, angels) combined with scientific practice. This idea stemmed
from a transformation that occurred in Arabic transmutations of Greek cosmogonies and
culminated in their Latin and vernacular translations of the 12th
–15th
centuries.
ii. Examples
I will list here some of the examples we have of the Children of the Planets in manuscripts
and print. I will limit this list to those that will be addressed in this thesis. The earliest
examples of the Children of the Planets, wherein we see in a series of seven separate folios
depicting the planets, accompanied by multiple personifications of their correspondences,
their children, appear just before the turn of the 15th
century. Genreally they are thought to
depict the correspondences, activities, and professions associated with each planet, e.g.,
Saturn, black, diggers, farmers, toil, old age, death, an old man on a crutch, a reaper, a hang-
man, a begger; Jupiter, white, nobility, a lord, archers, riders, scholars; Mars, red, wrath,
war, fire, killing, fighting; Sun, gold, prayer, kings, fencing, wrestling, ruling; Venus,
bathers, lovers, musicians, dancers; Mercury, green, craftsmen, doctors, scribes,
illuminators; Luna, silver, magicians, water, fishermen, fools. The earliest example in the
West is the 1407, Épître d’Othéa, by Christine de Pisan (BNF MS fr.606), with other early
examples being the 1445 Kassel manuscript (Passauer Calendar, 2 Ms. astron. 1), the 1460
De Sphaera (Cristoforo de Perdis, Lat. 202, Estense, Modena), the 1475 Joseph of Ulm MS
(originally dated to 1404, Tübingen Library, UB M. d. 2.), the 1491 Heidelberger
Schicksalsbuch, (Cod. Pal. Germ. 832), the 15th
century Rawl. D 1220, in English, the 1480
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Housebook (Waldburg-Wolfegg),14
and 16th
century examples in the Splendor Solis (Berlin
Kupferstichkabinett, Cod. 78 D 3, ca. 1531, Harl. MS 3469, d. 1582). The earliest printed
example, coming even before movable type is a woodcut Block-Book print, the
Planetenbuch (Heidelberg, Universitatsbibliothek, Cod. Pal. Germ. 438, 149r–150v),
probably dating from about 1455, but possibly earlier.15
Other early prints are found in the
1460 Baccio Baldini engravings, the 1460 London Block-Book in the British Library (I A
27), the 1460 Basel Block-Book, Öffentliche Bibliothek (A N V 37a), 1470 Wirkungen der
Planeten Block-Book (Granger Collection), the 1470 Berlin Block-Book,
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, the Copenhagen Block-Book, Statens Museum for
Kunst (Det kongelige Bibliotek); the Vienna Block-Book (Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Ink.2.d.4); the 1510 prints of Jörg Breu the Elder (Kupferstichkabinett,
Berlin, Staatliche Museen), and the 15th
c. Schwabach Block-Book (Kirchen-
Kapetelsbibliotek). The Augsburg prints of Erhard Ratdolt are a source of comparison for
planet figures, as those seen in the 1488 Flores astrologiae of Abû Ma‘shar, Astrolabium
planum of Johannes Angelus, and the 1489 Magnis coniunctionibus.
The Arabic Kitāb al-Bulhān (Baghdad 1399, Bodl. MS Or 133) and the lesser
known Ottoman Kitāb al-maṭāli‘ al-sa‘āda wa-yanābī‘ al-Sayyāda (Book of ascensions of
bliss and the fountains of Lordship, 1582, BNF Suppl. Turc. 242, PM M. 788), are rare
examples of the motif in Islamic iconography, each show 56 panels, 7 planets, and 7 x 7
children, elaborately illustrated. How these are related to the Kitāb akham al-Mawālīd
14
See, Zdravko Blazekovic, “Variations on the Theme of the Planet’s Children, or Medieval Musical Life
According to the Housebook’s Astrological Imagery,” in Art and Music in the Early Modern Period, ed.
Katherine A. McIver (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003), 242–244. The Housebook in a way
bridges the gap between manuscript and print, because it illustrator is famous for his early dry-point prints. 15
Blazekovic, “Variations on the Theme of the Planet’s Children,” 244, fn. 3. See, Adam von Bartsch,
Illustrated Bartsch: German Single Leaf Woodcuts before 1500, no.161, ed. Richard S. Field (New York:
Abaris Books, 1987).
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(Book of nativities), a source to both the Kitāb al-Bulhān16
and the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm will be
seen.
The Kraków Picatrix (BJ 793, discovered in 1915, which dates to ca. 1458), the only
illustrated Latin manuscript of this infamous 11th
century handbook of talismanic magic,
depicts four ‘children’ of each planet. It is an important text for its variations from other
manuscripts and its East-Central European origin. There is also a Spanish manuscript
composed under Alfonso X (Reg. lat. 1283a, folios 1–3617
), that contains fragments of the
Picatrix,18
which Aby Warburg identified in 1911 (sometime in the vicinity of discovering
the Latin version) containing many brilliant illustrations of the planetary figures, some of
which bear interesting similarities to the Kraków manuscript.
iii. Fritz Saxl and the Surrounding Scholarship
Though the Children of the Planets motif has been discussed by well-known authors, most
importantly Fritz Saxl, the art historian and director of the Warburg Institute and Library,
and colleague of Aby Warburg,19
there are still questions that remain about its provenance.
Without Saxl’s research on the Children of the Planets, begun in 1912, there would be no
comprehensive comparison of examples or catalogue of manuscripts surrounding the motif.
Saxl developed, with Hans Meier, a system of understanding the different types of planet
iconographies based on their different source texts. Many of the questions that are still
unanswered about the Children of the Planets motif may have been answered if not for the
16
The first treatise in the Kitāb al-Bulhān is Abû Ma‘shar’s ‘Book of Nativities,’ this is why we often see the
manuscript as a whole is often attributed to Abû Ma‘shar. See, Stefano Carboni, “The Wise Abû Ma‘shar al-
Balkhi from the kitāb al-bulhān,” in Venice in the Islamic World, 828–1797, (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007). 17
For a published edition of Vaticanus Reginensis 1283 see Alfonso d’Agostino, Astromagia (MS Reg. Lat.
1283 a) de Alfonso X el Sabio (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1992). Margharita Fiorello has worked on an English
translation of the text based on this text. See “Hermes Zodiologion,” accessed on 04.01.2012,
http://heavenastrolabe.net/hermes-on-moon-mansions. 18
David Pingree, “Between the Ghaya and the Picatrix: The Spanish Version,” The Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 27–56. 19
See, Fritz Saxl, A Heritage of Images: A Selection of Lectures by Fritz Saxl, ed. Hugh Honour and John
Fleming, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). Also, Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky, “Classical Mythology in
Mediaeval Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 4, no. 2 (1933): 228–280.
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untimely deaths of these two early scholars. Some of Saxl’s conclusions have been
questioned and recently reexamined (even he had hesitations about his own transmission
theory that traced the motif from Hellenistic through Oriental to Babylonian sources)20
by
Dieter Blume, Stefano Carboni, and Ewa Śnieżyńska-Stolot. Scholarship generally agrees
that the motif depicts the seven planets with people performing the human professions, but
there is more to the story than this. I will look at how, in the Eastern examples, the multiple
anthropomorphic figures in the motif represented forms of the planet itself, multiple
‘planetoids,’ and not simply humans born under each planet’s influence. We can see in the
Kitāb al-Bulhān (Book of Wonderment), Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs (Book of Istamatis), and the
Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Goal of the Sage) examples of this.
Erwin Panofsky, Raymond Klibansky, and Fritz Saxl in their work Saturn and
Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art21
traced the
origins of melancholia back to Pythagorean philosophy through ‘humoralism,’ the belief in
the doctrine of the four humors corresponding to the four elements and divisions of time.
Melancholia was the nature associated with the planet Saturn and black bile. Thus the
melancholic person was the person born under the influence of the planet Saturn, the
Saturnine nature synonymous with the melancholic. This work examined many examples of
the Children of the Planets motif in the case of Saturn, including Dürer’s Melancholia I.
Earlier Aby Warburg encountered the motif in his studies of the Palazzo Schifanoia frescos
in Ferrara.22
During that time Warburg made possibly his most important iconographic
discovery, that the images in the central row of the Schifanoia frescos (ca. 1470) were
derived from descriptions in Abû Ma‘shar’s Introductorium maius. Warburg also identified
the Children of the Planets in the frescos, specifically, the children of Venus (see Image 30).
Many of the questions about the origin and provenance of the planetary iconography that
20
Duits, “Reading the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” 3. 21
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural
Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964). 22
Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” in The Renewal
of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 1999), 563–591.
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were left pending after Warburg’s research were handed over to Saxl who would also study
the iconography of the constellations, coming up with an explanation of their transmission
that is still today the model for other scholars. The transmission of images of the planets
became Saxl’s area of expertise for the remainder of his career. Saxl found relationships
between planetary motifs in the Children of the Planets, Labors of the Months, and
Decans.23
In the 1950s and 1960s D.S. Rice and Eva Baer additionally established a
manuscript relation between Arabic and Ottoman examples of the motif, in the Kitāb al-
Bulhān and the Kitāb al-maṭāli‘.24
More recently David Pingree (1933–2005) and Charles
Burnett also did extensive research on the Kitāb al-Bulhān.25
In his 2011 article, “Reading
the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” Rembrandt Duits points to the need
for revisiting some of Saxl’s valuable research, while reexamining scholarship on the theory
of the transmission and the origins of planet imagery. These have remained uncontested
only until recently when Dieter Blume pointed out some of the gaps in Saxl’s transmission
theory.26
Lastly, D.S. Rice’s conclusions about the possible northern Italian predecessor of
the Kitāb al-Bulhān have never been reconciled with Saxl’s transmission theories, and this
conflict is something I will return to.
We know that one text often appended to the Children of the Planet images was
derived in part from Abû Ma‘shar’s Introductorium maius.27
The writings of Abû Ma‘shar
were very influential in the Renaissance, and reoccur in the works of many important
figures. Marsilio Ficino’s work dedicated to Matthias Corvinus, De vita coelitus
compranda, shows some of this influence, as well as the Picatrix.28
The Picatrix was also an
influence on this book of Ficino’s, and he gives many descriptions of anthropomorphic
23
Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art.” 24
Baer, “Representations of ‘Planet-Children’ in Turkish Manuscripts,” 526–533; D. S. Rice, “The Seasons
and the Labors of the Months in Islamic Art,” Ars Orientalis 1 (1954): 1–39. 25
Pingree, “Between the Ghaya and the Picatrix.” 26
Dieter Blume, Regenten des Himmels: Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Berlin:
Akademie, 2000). 27
Carboni, Following the Stars: Images of the Zodiac in Islamic Art, 5. 28
Ficino also gives a Decan description which he takes from Abû Ma‘shar, for example. See, Frances Yates,
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 70.
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planetary figures that mirror those in the Picatrix. Ficino approached the understanding of
mankind as ‘children of the planets’ with tools to harness the benevolent qualities of a given
planet through science and medicine, even if we are born under a “bad sign” (he being a
child of Saturn himself).29
Ficino introduced a new quality to the children of Saturn, where a
melancholic nature could be used toward devout scholarship.30
This character of Ficino’s
marks the very particular approach to science and theology that was emerging at that time,
where the individual lived under the influences of the divine spheres, yet was capable
through practical means of magic to manipulate the confines of destiny. This was an attempt
by an exemplary Renaissance individual that reflects the idea of man’s desire to use his own
hands to capture the divine, and to put it into use in everyday life.
The Children of the Planets motif was a scientific, a religious, and a practical tool. In
a 2010 conference paper, “Astrology as Sociology: Depictions of the ‘Children of the
Planets’ 1400–1600,” Geoffrey Shamos discussed how this motif helped people in the early
modern period to understand the science of the cosmos, and was even a social tool for
“categorizing corporate identity,”31
meaning that people could use the motif to identify
where to place themselves among a group of individuals that all shared the same character,
birth sign, or vocation. Therefore the Children of the Planets had an important sociological
function as well. Each planet, among its other correspondences, sympathized with different
activities and professions. In some of the more elaborate examples we can see popular
trades of the 15th
century, a manuscript copier, an icon illuminator, a musician playing a
hurdy-gurdy, even a street magician demonstrating the ‘cups and balls’ routine (see Image
1).
29
Carol Kaske and John Clark, “Introduction,” in Three Books on Life, Marsilio Ficino (New York: Medieval
& Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998). 30
See, Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy. 31
Geoffrey Shamos, “Astrology as Sociology: Depictions of the Children of the Planets 1400–1600,” (lecture
at conference “Imagining Astrology: Painted Schemes and Threads of the Soul,” University of Bristol Institute
for Research in the Humanities and Arts and the Centre for Medieval Studies, July 10, 11, 2010); his
dissertation by a similar title: “Depictions of the ‘Children of the Planets’ in European Art, 1400–1600,” (PhD
diss., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, n.d.); also, “Lords of Lords: Courtly Depictions of the
‘Children of the Planets,’” (seminar, “Origins,” Eighth Annual Graduate Humanities Forum Conference,
University of Pennsylvania, Feb., 28, 2008).
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By learning the principles of astrology and the artifacts of a given planet, the
knowing scholar would be able to operate upon, or in accordance with, the forces of
Fortune, thus triumphing over her, and practicing the will of God. For example, the Children
of the Planets falls under the heading of ‘catarchic astrology’ which “denying the
determinism of ordinary astrology, attempts to provide rules for choosing the moments most
auspicious for commencing activities in this world,”32
much like the sympathetic magic of
the Picatrix which attempts to provide the same tools. In the Picatrix the significance of
depicting the planets in multiple forms was in order to draw down from them their power
(or influence of the god) in the form of a spell in order to perform a task.33
To understand the significance of this motif, we must first look at the time period
that popularized it. “This was a time when intellectual forms dominated and filled life; a
time when even festival pageants were influenced by the basic thoughts concerning
freedom, destiny, and the relationship of man to the world. In such a time, thought does not
remain enclosed within itself but rather strives for visible symbols.”34
The Children of the
Planets is an example of this striving to put the intellectual into the visual in early modern
thought. It was used to express religious ideas particularly about the correspondences
between heavenly objects and their mundane counterparts. It revitalized the power of
images in the religious thought of the time. Thus the motif related a philosophy through its
depictions. A ‘child of the planet’ was the image of the god of the planet with the artifacts,
colors, symbols, expressing the ideas corresponding to each, thereby imparting knowledge
of all these things when looking upon it.
iv. Treatise on the Seven Planets: The Children of the Planets in the
32
David Pingree, “Some of the Sources of the Ghāyat al-hakīm,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 43 (1980): 7. 33
Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life (London: Routledge/ Kegan Paul Ltd.,
1984). 34
Ernst Cassirer, “Freedom and Necessity in the Philosophy of the Renaissance,” in The Individual and the
Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (New York: Harper/Row, 1963).
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Framework of Ptolemaic Astrology
The first appearances of the Children of the Planets come to us at the beginning of the 15th
century, the earliest examples being those anomalous images in the 1399 Kitāb al-Bulhān
(Book of Wonderment, Bodl. Or. 133)35
and the illuminations in Christine de Pisan’s 1407
Épître d’Othéa. But we can discuss the contexts in which these images were formed by
looking at the traditions of astrological texts that have informed the motif. Ewa Śnieżyńska-
Stolot explains that the system informing the astrological attributions associated with the
planets follows Teucer of Babylon (1st century AD), his sequence beginning with Mars
(Abû Ma‘shar and the Picatrix, for example, follow Teucer’s system).36
It is from Teucer
that we have descriptions of the Decans, Terms, and Climes, which we will discuss in this
thesis.37
Raymond Llull (ca. 1232–1315) adds modifications to the Decan lore of this
system, where he includes the daily solar motion – ascendant, stationary, and descendant –
and positions of the planets.38
The broader heritage of works describing the planets and
their earthly correspondences came from many sources drawing on Teucer, such as Manlius
(c. 14 AD) and Rhetorius the Egyptian (7th
c. AD). Tuecer’s explanation of certain
astrological aspects differed in some points from Ptolemy. Ptolemy provided the broader
astronomical model that would dominate the Middle Ages. Ptolemy collected and adapted
earlier astronomical literatures and provided geometrical models, in an effort provide an
improved understanding of the universe. Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblios and Almagest were widely
known and reproduced, having been translated and commented on by Arabic sources, for
35
We will speak in Chapter II about the two other Ottoman examples, which are derived from the Kitāb al-
Bulhān. 36
She compares this to a second but similar distinct system, the Indian system of Varahamihira (532 AD).
Ewa Śnieżyńska-Stolot, Astrological Iconography in the Middle Ages: The Decanal Planets (Cracow:
Jagiellonian University Press, 2003), 10. 37
Stephan Heilen, “Ptolemy’s Doctrine of the Terms and Its Reception,” in Ptolemy in Perspective: Use and
Criticism of his Work from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, edited by Alexander Jones (New York:
Springer, 2010), 57. 38
Ewa Śnieżyńska-Stolot, Astrological Iconography in the Middle Ages: The Decanal Planets (Cracow:
Jagiellonian University Press, 2003), 10.
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example, by Abû Ma‘shar (787–886) in his De magnus conjunctionibus.39
Abû Ma‘shar’s
Introductorium maius is another crucial source of astrological ideas in the medieval and
early modern eras, and it is from this work that the text that commonly accompanies the
Children of the Planets motif is derived.40
Along with the Centiloquium ascribed to
Ptolemy, these astrological works describe the influences of the planets on the sublunar
world. They follow a heliocentric model of the universe that can be compared with the
Aristotelian model made up of 55 concentric circles, where the Ptolemaic system would
have a simplified 10 spheres and additional refinements concerning uniform circular motion
modified by epicycles. This system was familiar throughout the antique world. “Islamic
astrologers conceived of the universe as a series of concentric circles with the earth at the
center. Charts found in medieval manuscripts, such as in early copies of al-Qazwini’s
cosmological work entitled ‘Aja’ ib al-makhluqat wa ghara’ ib al-mawjudat (The wonders
of Creation and the Oddities of existing Things), written in the second half of the 13th
century, elucidate this theory.”41
A most influential Greek text on astronomy translated into
Arabic was Ptolemy’s Almagest. “The most important, original contribution of Islamic
scientists to astronomy is the study of the rotation of the moon…The system of the Lunar
Mansions (manazil al-qamar)…corresponds to the moon’s twenty-eight ‘stops’ – that is, to
the number of phases from new moon to new moon within the Zodiac.”42
These traditions of astrology were incorporated into many different confessions
throughout late antiquity. The terms ‘astrology’ and ‘astronomy’ we can point out were used
interchangeably probably until the 14th century, when we begin to see some examples of
the terms being used differently. We see Pietro d’Abano (1257–1316) struggling to
distinguish the two terms between their derivation from similar Greek terms logos and
39
Keiji Yamamoto and Charles Burnett, trans., eds., Abû Ma‘sar on Historical Astrology. The Book of
Religions and Dynasties (On the Great Conjunctions), 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 40
Blazekovic, “Variations on the Theme of the Planet’s Children,” 244, fn. 6. See also, Panofsky and Saxl,
“Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art”; and Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo
Schifanoia, Ferrara,” 567. 41
Carboni, Following the Stars, 3. 42
Carboni, Following the Stars, 4.
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nomos, one being a descriptive science on the motion of the stars while the other being the
juridical, describing their effects.43
Pietro d’Abano, whose work probably inspired the
Children of the Planets frescos in the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, references the
Speculum astronomiae of Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) in his discussions promoting
astrology. More specifically Albertus Magnus defended astrology as a Christian form of
knowledge44
in the Speculum astronomiae (written after 1260), and responded to a Paris
debate culminating at the time, in 1277, with the 219 propositions of Bishop Tempier that
forbade certain astrological works, such as Al-Kindi’s (802–873) De radiis stellarum.45
Albertus Magnus used both Ptolemy’s and Abû Ma‘shar’s works to structure and defend his
system of astrology.46
Astronomy/Astrology was included among the seven Liberal Arts,
generally listed as Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and
Astronomy. Charles Burnett points to an interesting variation of the Liberal Arts in the
Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi,47
the 11th
/12th
century polemicist, translator from
Arabic, and Jewish convert to Christianity, who was physician at the court of Alfonso VI of
León and Castile. Here, instead, we have Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Medicine,
Music, Astronomy, and the undetermined seventh being either Necromancy, Philosophy, or
Grammar. In the Picatrix the first chapter of the third book is dedicated to explaining which
planets govern which arts. The list of the sciences associated with Mercury, are, for
example, “dialectic, grammar, philosophy, geometry, astronomy/astrology, geomancy, the
43
Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, V (New York: Columbia University Press,
1953). 44
Scott Hendrix, How Albert the Great’s Speculum astronomiae was Interpreted and Used by Four Centuries
of Readers: A Study in Late Medieval Medicine, Astronomy and Astrology (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen
Press, 2010). 45
Benedek Láng, Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central
Europe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2008), 23, fn. 27. 46
Richard Lemay, “The Paris Prohibitions of 1210/15, the formulas of absolution by Gregory IX (1231), and
the Incipit of Albertus Magnus’ Speculum Astronomiae. Origin and canonical character of the Speculum
Astronomiae,” Unpublished paper, n.d.; Richard Lemay, Abû Ma‘shar and Latin Aristotelianism (Beirut: The
Catholic Press, 1962). 47
Charles Burnett, “Talismans: Magic as Science? Necromancy among the Seven Liberal Arts,” in Magic and
Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and Techniques in the Islamic and Christian Worlds (Brookfield:
Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996).
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notary art, augury” and the interpretation of language.48
These kinds of variations show us
not only that astrology was a subject seen as central to the discovery of knowledge, but that
other subjects which we might assume conflicted with the status quo in fact played a larger
role in medieval Europe. We see that astrology was well incorporated into Christian, Jewish,
and Islamic exegeses. This is apparent in the treatise on the seven planets that we will
examine in the following chapters, which are not only attributed to many different authors,
but also incidentally found in all different confessions.
There are treatises of the properties of the seven planets and nativities attributed to
Islamic authors, like Jābir ibn Hayyān (as in Christine de Pisan’s work, Épître d’Othéa) and
Abû Ma‘shar, but also to Jewish sources, like Ibn Ezra. This last attribution we find in
William Lilly’s 1655 introduction to the English translation of Johannes Angelus’s
Astrolabium planum (published in 1488 by Erhard Ratdolt, a work whose primary source
we can trace through Pietro d’Abano back to Abû Ma‘shar). He writes that the work “had its
Original from the Aegyptians, and was first made known to us in Europe by the learned Jew
Even Ezra,” that is, Abraham Ben Meir Ibn Ezra (1089–1164), the well-known Toledan
philosopher, astronomer, and writer. Christian sources also commonly included works about
the seven planets, for example the Book of the Seven Planets by Ramon Llull (1232–1315),
the Christian philosopher and translator. In it he examines certain traditions and attributes
ascribed to each planet in a critical account. Even though it is difficult to track down Llull’s
sources, because of his style of writing which does not cite any, the description of the
planets’ features are familiar to us from other authors, similar to those in the Centiloquium,
or in later author’s like Johannes Angelus and Christine de Pisan. Saturn is described as “of
the complexion of earth…it is masculine, diurnal, bad, and rules lead and Saturdays. It rules
Capricorn and Aquarius and completes its cycle in thirty years.”49
Llull says melancholy,
48
Greer and Warnock, Picatrix, 3.1:135.
49 Ramon Llull, “The Seven Planets: Saturn,” 1.1 in Book of the Seven Planets,
http://lullianarts.net/planets/planet.html. This is the only edition provided by the Ramon Llull Database, Centre
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good memory, and all the above properties belong to people “influenced” by Saturn, and
that each planet is a lord of the things below which are “the imprints of operations above
[the planets] imprinting their likenesses on natural operations with their natural properties
and virtues, like a foot leaves its print in sand.”50
This seems to reflect very much the
Ptolemaic understanding, maybe even particularly through the intricacies discussed in the
Speculum astronomiae.
The presence of astrology along side religious discourse can be explained by a way
of thinking about religion as a universal tendency, something we might call “natural
religion,” that is, the idea that the belief in the divine is common to all.51
In the 12th
century
we can speak of a certain “discovery of nature” that preceded movements in natural
philosophy.52
This trend went hand and hand with Greek and Arabic translation movements.
Its counterpart in the 15th
century is seen in such works as De pace fide of Nicholas Cusanus
(1401–1464) in his expression “una religio in varietate rituum” (one religion in many
rituals). We find the idea of a “universal language” of religion in the 13th
century Book of
the Gentile and the Three Wise Men of Ramon Llull, where we have a discourse between
four individuals from different religions, again looking for the “true” religion. The work is a
dialogue set in an ideal forest where three “wise men” comes across a grove of five trees.
They begin a discussion in which they are aided by a lady who appears on a white horse,
Intellegentia, who instructs them to learn the secret language of nature, which is inscribed in
the trees that surround them. They are joined by a pagan man who, before he realizes that
the three men are of different faiths, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian, requests to convert to
the religion that they are discussing. The men offer him a compromise where they will all
de Documentacio Ramon Llull (http://centrellull.ub.edu/), University of Barcelona,
http://orbita.bib.ub.edu/ramon/bo.asp, all accessed on April 17, 2012. For a Spanish edition see, Ramon Llull,
“Tratado de astrología,” ed. Joan-Manuel Ballesta, Revista Astrológica Mercurio-3, no. 34 (Barcelona, 1991),
177. 50
Ramon Llull, “Questions,” 2.2 in Book of the Seven Planets, accessed on April 17, 2012,
http://lullianarts.net/planets/planet.html. 51
Stanley Tambiah, “Magic, Science, and religion in Western Thought: Anthropology’s Intellectual Legacy,”
in Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5. 52
Yossef Zvi Schwartz, “Religious Conversion and Migration of Knowledge” (course lecture, Central
European University, Budapest, Feb. 27, 2012).
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participate in a discussion in order to find the best faith. This dialogue gives us a sense of
the way of thinking that would have placed astrological ideas inside a philosophical
discussion taking place between different confessions.
We will see in the following chapters how the Children of the Planets are couched in
these ideas, and that the texts that we find them among reflect an inclusive type of theology
in the early modern period. In all the contexts that we find the motif we can observe a sense
of eclecticism. The Épître d’Othéa serves as a comprehensive guide to the noble way of life
informed by the knowledge of the ancients, while the Kitāb al-Bulhān is a collection of
astrological treatises and different “wonders” of creation, whose purpose may also have
been to serve as a compendium of ancient knowledge. The treatises of the Housebook (1480
Waldburg-Wolfegg), the work which provides us with perhaps the most well-known
examples of the Children of the Planet’s motif, is a collection of a variety of diverse topics,
from medicine, to astrology, to the art of memory, which was probably designed as a
learning tool for its owner. In the Picatrix manuscript Canon. Misc. 500 we find this most
famous treatise on magic next to an illustrated herbal and a Clavis of Trithemius. The
Block-Books, like the Heidelberger bilderkatechismus planetenbuch (Cod. Pal. germ. 438),
are also found in compilations of various works of astrology combined with Christian
theological themes. In every example we see the motif participating in a dialogue with the
texts that surround it, a dialogue between the collected knowledges of many cultures that
inform and respond to each other.
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Chapter 1
“Being a Planet’s Child by Choice”
The aim of this first chapter is to explore the idea that originally inspired this thesis, that is,
the Children of the Planets as a concept, and to show how it embodies an attitude toward
theology that was a signature of Renaissance individualism.
I first came across the Children of the Planets through a perhaps unexpected route.
While researching a Hermetic treatise called the Asclepius (ca. 300),53
which deals with
cosmology, human nature, and certain theurgic religious practices, I found my way to
Marsilio Ficino’s De vita coelitus comparanda, which is in part a commentary on this work.
Here the idea that ‘we are all children of the planets’ first occurred to me as an analogy for
the revival of astrology in the 15th
century, ushering in the rather modern concept that the
individual, through his own actions, is capable of interacting with the divine on a daily level
– and, specifically, that he has a choice in the matter of his own destiny. This led me
ultimately to Ernst Cassirer’s treatment of Ficino’s contribution to the philosophical
discourse on freedom and necessity. No recent scholarship has continued the conversation
started by Cassirer about the Children of the Planets as a way of thinking, a fact that is not
surprising based on the very small number of scholars who have written in detail about the
Children of the Planets motif in general. One of the few people who has recently
commented on the Children of the Planets, Rembrandt Duits, remarked on this fact when I
53
For discussions on this work see: Pasquale Arfé, “The Annotations of Nicolaus Cusanus and Giovanni
Andrea Bussi on the Asclepius.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999): 29–59. Clement
Salaman, The Asclepius: the Perfect Discourse of Hermes Trismegistus (London: Duckworth Publishing,
2007). Brian P. Copenhaver, ed. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New
English Translation, with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Antoine
Faivre, The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (Grand Rapids,
MI: Phanes Press, 1995). A. J. Festugière, La révélation d’Hermès Trismegiste I: L’astrologie et les sciences
occultes, vol. 1, reprint (Paris: Les Belles lettres, 1989 [1944]). Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A
Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Wouter J.
Hanegraaff, “Sympathy or the Devil: Renaissance Magic and the Ambivalence of Idols,” Esoterica 2 (2000):
1–44. Vincent Hunink, “Apuleius and the ‘Asclepius.’” Vigiliae Christianae 50, no. 3 (1996): 288–308. Jean-
Pierre Mahé, Hermès en Haute-Égypte, 2 vols. (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1978–82), 2:45–
272, 1:16–20.
Marvin Meyer, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition. Excerpt from the Perfect Discourse
(San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2007).
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spoke with him in April 2012. Duits has also pointed out in his recent article (2011),
“Reading the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” that until Dieter Blume,54
no one had questioned Saxl’s account of the origin of the planet iconography, nor has
anyone else done significant follow up on his comprehensive studies of the Children of the
Planets. That being said, this chapter will approach the conceptual basis for the Children of
the Planets through the available sources, while charting new territory where the argument
demands. For the moment then we will briefly step away from the strict sense of the
Children of the Planets, solely as a visual motif, and consider its more philosophical
implications.
I. Cassirer and his treatment of Ficino’s Astrological Solution:
Finding Free Will in Divine Will
The conceptual basis for the Children of the Planets theme comes from a philosophical
perspective peculiar to the Renaissance, as elaborated by Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) in his
work The Individual and the Cosmos.55
Cassirer used the term ‘children of the planets’ in
his chapter “Freedom and Necessity in the Philosophy of the Renaissance” to describe the
close proximity felt by many of the humanists, like Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), to the
stars. The discussion of fate and free will, amongst the oldest of philosophical debates, was
enlivened by humanistic ideologies on the borderlands of modernity, where new scientific
approaches, based on Ptolemaic astronomical models, had to find their place in a religious
discourse.
As an astrological idea, the Children of the Planets is a descendant of the same
Ptolemaic system of astrology that Ficino was using and that was the standard throughout
the Middle Ages. Ptolemaic astrology (Ptolemy, 90–168), a popular refinement of
Aristotelian cosmology, was based on a geocentric model of the universe that consisted of
54
Dieter Blume, Regenten des Himmels: Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Berlin:
Akademie, 2000), 201–204. 55
Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (New York: Harper/Row, 1963).
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ten concentric spheres, earth being the first followed by the seven planets, moving in
epicycles within their own orbits, surrounded by the sphere of the fixed stars, and lastly the
sphere of the prime mover. This astronomical system was elaborated in the Almagest (the
title derived from the Arabic translation of the Greek ‘Mathēmatikē Syntaxis’), which had
been translated from Arabic into Latin around 1230. The Tetrabiblios provided the more
theoretical astrological concepts of the Ptolemaic understanding, along with the Pseudo-
Ptolemaic Centiloquium (appearing in the early 10th
century).
Cassirer pointed to Ficino’s unique treatment of astrological topics, not only in his
ways of attempting to harmonize them with Christianity, but also in his attempts to modify
(and manipulate) concepts of fate and divine will with astrological recipes.
The same planet can become the friend or foe of a man; it can unfold those powers that bring
bliss or those that bring evil, according to the inner attitude that man assumes towards the
planet…Ficino retains the idea of ‘being children of the planets’; but in addition to this natural
descendance from the planet he also recognizes an intellectual descendance – he recognizes
the possibility, as has been said, of being a ‘planet’s child by choice.’56
For Ficino there are ways of interacting with the planets that can enhance their beneficial
influences. Through religious practice then, that is aligned with both God and the stars,
Ficino proposes a course toward a healthy way of living, and one where individual actions
have a role to play. Whether a divine will dictates the outcomes of events or Fortune uses
the stars to do so, the course of the future is determined in both theological and astrological
dogmas. This is part of the reason that these two can sometimes be married, as in Ficino’s
Christianity. For Ficino, there are some ways of softening determinism through right living.
What part the individual has to play and whether he has any control of his own choices, is a
question that has always bothered the philosophy of religion. To keep things simple, we can
look at one source of Ficino’s understanding, from an almost unending list of sources where
freedom and necessity have been discussed, in order to understand how our theme, the
Children of the Planets, communicates a unique solution to this problem.
56
Cassirer, “Freedom and Necessity in the Philosophy of the Renaissance,” 113.
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II. Augustine on Fortuna and Felicitas
St. Augustine (354–430), in book five of De civitate dei, examined closely discourses on
happiness and fate.57
Augustine distinguished two realms (as in the central theme of this
work, the earthly city versus the ‘city of God’) in his discussion of fate; the earthly sphere
and the sphere of salvation. First he ‘redefines’ fate, distinguishing it from the common
definition, as that which is dictated by the stars, comparing this to the Stoic definition, as an
‘order of causes’ which was begun by the First Cause (or God).58
Augustine instead defines
fate as providence in the earthly realm, and defends the individual will, even if it is
something that God always foresees. The hidden causal order of events is God’s will. At the
same time he dealt with the topic of the determinism of astrology and undermined it, for
example, with the analogy of twins,59
where he used two people being born at the same
time, yet being ultimately very different, as proof that astrology does not dictate character
unquestionably. He examined the counter argument to this criticism of astrology as well, in
the story of the ‘Potter’s Wheel’ of Figulus (Nigidius), who spun the wheel and marked it
twice, at the same moment, revealing when the wheel was stopped that the marks were far
apart, in order to demonstrate that the velocity and expanse of the heavens are so great in
comparison to the moments each twin is born, that each actually has their own distinct mark
on the heavens and distinct horoscope. In the sphere of salvation, Augustine defines fate as
divine grace through another analogy of twins, Jacob and Esau (V, 4). Here the difference in
their two characters is a result of a choice that God made, and not dictated by the moment of
their birth, where Jacob was literally grasping the heal of his brother, and therefore was born
in the same moment, but was different in every possible way from Esau (Gen. 25:26).
57
Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, Books IV–VII, no. 412, vol. 2, trans. William Green
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press – Loeb Classical Library, 1963). 58
Augustine, City of God, 179, 5.8. 59
Augustine, City of God, 139–159, 5.2–5.6.
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Augustine also looks at Cicero’s critique of the Stoic definition of fate, as a “chain of
causes” ascribed to “the will and power of the supreme God.”60
Cicero denies that there can
be any foreknowledge of the future, by God or man, thereby denying astrological divination
and prophecy.61
Augustine says he prefers to deal with refuting the astrologers, who at least
believe in destiny, than to deal with Cicero on this point. But he accepts the replacement of
the determinism in the fate of astrology with a fate that was predestined by divine will.
Augustine recognized, of course, the problem of free will (liberum arbitrium), that if all is
decided beforehand by God, then there would be little point to life in general.62
“But if there
is a determined order of causes by which everything that happens happens, then all things
that happen happen by fate. If this is the case, there is nothing really in our power, and the
will really has no free choice. And if we grant this, says Cicero, the whole basis of human
life is overthrown.”63
And if human laws do not actually have any consequence, then there
is no real justice in the world, says Cicero.64
Cicero “chose free will” over foreknowledge of
the future, therefore rejecting astrological divination and an all-knowing God. This is why
Augustine tried to define fate in such a specific way, or even to replace the term altogether,
with the will of God, or as an order in which necessity operates, where things happen for a
reason. This does not exclude free will for Augustine. For him we still have a choice, even if
it is one that God foresaw us making. “Nor do we fear that our acts of free will (voluntate
facimus) will not be acts of free will if it is granted that he whose foreknowledge cannot be
mistaken foreknows that we will so act. Cicero had this fear and so rejected foreknowledge.
The Stoics had it, and so they said that not everything happens by necessity, although they
maintained that everything is brought about by fate.”65
Augustine wrote a dialogue dealing
60
Augustine, City of God, 165, 5.8. 61
See, Cicero, On Divination, trans. W. Falconer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press – Loeb Classical
Library, 1923); Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press –
Loeb Classical Library, 1933), 3.95. 62
Augustine, City of God, 171, 5.9. 63
Augustine, City of God, 171, 5.8. 64
Cicero, De fato, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press – Loeb Classical Library, 1948),
40. 65
Augustine, City of God, 171, 5.9.
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with additional problems about free will in his work De libero arbitrio (On free will).
Simon Harrison’s book about this work examines a difficulty that arises when scholars try
to explain Augustine’s understanding of free will objectively, in a “single, monolithic
‘theory of will.’”66
He proposes that Augustine approaches the problem of free will
subjectively, as a problem of knowledge, where Augustine might ask, “how do I know I am
free?” Harrison calls this appraoch “Augustine’s way into the will.”67
He suggests that what
seems to be a conflict to some scholars might actually be the result of a complex
understanding of free will for Augustine.68
Augustine often points out that anyone only wills
what is good, and that it is only an unwitting consequence that sin occurs through free
will.69
John Rist commented on this understanding of Augustine’s, writing “free will is a
good, and that it is better that God created men subject to the possibility of the abuse of free
will than that he did not create them.”70
This aspect expressed for Rist Augustine’s mature
view of free will (as seen in De civitate dei), where man has chosen the lesser of two virtues
in the cases that he sins, but borders on a “philosophical chimera” that places man between
good and evil.71
Free will for Augustine is something that effects daily life, something that
could add to the virtue of one’s character, but it is not something that will ultimately
interfere with the destiny that has been set for each person, by God, in the realm of
salvation.
Necessity is redefined too, not simply as those things outside of our power to control,
such as death, but rather as the need for things to happen for a reason.72
Choice is essential
66
Simon Harrison, Augustine’s Way into the Will: The Theological and Philosophical Significance of De
libero arbitrio (Oxford: Oxford University Press – Oxford Early Christian Studies, 2006), vii. 67
Harrison, Augustine’s Way into the Will, vii. 68
Gerald Bonner’s made a comparison of the different positions that Augustine could take on the matter of
free will, where he saw both “the earlier teacher, who proclaimed the freedom of the will; and the later Doctor
of Grace and defender of Predestination.” See, Gerald Bonner, God’s Decree and Man’s Destiny (London:
Variorum Reprints, 1987), xii. 69
Augustine, De libero arbitrio, trans. (Westminster: Newman Press, 1955), 2.1.3. 70
John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 108. 71
Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, 131. 72
Augustine, City of God, 183, 5.10.
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for the correct belief in God. “There is no right living if there is no correct belief in God”73
and this can only result from a conscious effort to follow Him. The will still exists, even if
God foresees it. This seemingly paradoxical argument is perhaps one of the few places that
we see Ficino deviate from Augustine, who he looks to in general for religious authority.
Augustine was aware that a comprise between fate and divine will could be had, saying
“some make this (astrological fate) independent of the will of God, while others maintain
that it depends upon his will”74
but ultimately decided not to mend the two. For him it is
within God’s will to choose to make anyone happy. Thus Augustine would choose, if he had
to, Felicitas over Fortuna, for if “happiness were a goddess, it would be affirmed that she
alone might properly be worshiped.”75
So Ficino’s distinct move was in the opposite direction of Cicero on the subject of free
will. All three thinkers, Cicero, Augustine, and Ficino, refuse to part with free will. But each
represent a different philosophical way of dealing with it in relation to the divine. Cicero in
refusing to part with free will, chooses the simplest answer; he does away with divination
and the foreknowledge of God. Augustine wants both free will and divine will, so parts with
divination/astrology, and distances divine will from the negative meanings of ‘fate.’ Ficino
refuses to part with astrology, divine foreknowledge, or free will, and he uses astrology as a
tool for the individual will to tap into divine foreknowledge. This is Ficino’s astrological
solution to the problem of fate and free will. Augustine and Cicero both renounced
astrology because of a determinism they felt there, but Ficino saw it as a tool to harness
one’s own fate and put individual free will in alignment with the divine will. Ficino sees
himself as a child of a planet (Saturn), in order to establish his kinship to the heavenly
realm. In that sense, as a descendant of the stars, he participates in his own destiny, the
making of his own fortune; becoming the planet that dictates the outcome of his own
fortune. Becoming like a planet, the very planet that governs one’s nativity, will eventually
73
Augustine, City of God, 187, 5.10. 74
Augustine, City of God, 135, 5.1. 75
Augustine, City of God, 133, 5. Preface.
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lead, through formulas and practice, to becoming the planet itself, at which point the
individual governs his/her own fate. We will look at how the planets can act as
intermediaries through their mundane correspondences, or how this was understood as
possible in the following section.
III. Ficino’s De vita coelitus comparanda and the Picatrix
Ficino’s cosmography was based on a Ptolemaic universe, and was one that understood the
whole world as a living creature. He relied heavily on an understanding of the universe that
related each person’s destiny to the arrangement of the planets at their birth. But he made
sure to add that one can choose what qualities of each planet we are to be influenced by.
Ficino himself was a “child of Saturn,”76
doubly so, as Aquarius (governed by Saturn) was
on the horizon, with Saturn rising, at the moment of his birth. Saturn was generally believed
to be ‘a bad star,’ associated in depictions of the Children of the Planets, for example, with
pain, death, poverty, old age, and solitude. But Ficino found other meanings associated with
the planet, like wisdom, scholarship, and a devotional life, showing how all great
philosophers were born under Saturn, and emphasized these qualities in his first work De
vita libri tres (Three Books on Life). In their work, Saturn and Melancholy,77
Raymond
Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl traced the path of ‘melancholia,’ i.e., the
Saturnine nature, through Renaissance art and literature. They attributed to Ficino the
reinvigorating of the melancholic nature with positive qualities, thus creating a new way of
being a child of Saturn. “He it was who really gave shape to the idea of the melancholy man
of genius and revealed it to the rest of Europe.”78
A child of Saturn in the Ficinian model
was a scholar, an astrologer, a philosopher, as student of ancient wisdom – what we might
76
Even though Scorpio, ruled by Mars, was his Sun sign, he was both bothered by and felt akin to Saturn,
which is indicated in many of his letters. Marsilio Ficino, Opera omnia, 2 vols. (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo,
1959–1962), 732. 77
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of
Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964). 78
Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 255.
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identify as the description of a humanist. So, in this sense ‘melancholia’ was the complex
disposition that defined a way of life. “Thus, out of the intellectual situation of humanism –
that is to say out of the awareness of freedom experienced with a sense of tragedy – there
arose the notion of a genius which ever more urgently claimed to be emancipated in life and
works from the standards of ‘normal’ morality and the common rules of art. This notion
arose in close combination with the notion of a melancholy.”79
Carol Kaske and John Clark remark on Cassirer’s treatment of Ficino and the idea of
becoming ‘a planet’s child by choice’ in their introduction to Ficino’s work. They describe
how Ficino used the stars through sympathetic magic in order to “enhance free will rather
than discovering its impotence.”80
The idea that we are each descendants of the stars which
are in the sky at the moment of our birth is informed by a doctrine of correspondences,
which saw the microcosm as analogous to the macrocosm. In a hierarchy of genuses,
elements in each were related by similarity to each other, in astral, animal, mineral, and
vegetable life, e.g., Sun-King-Lion-Gold-Sunflower. This ‘Great Chain of Being’ was a
concept thought to be derived from the writings of Plato and Aristotle and popularized
through Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages. The idea of correspondences between heavenly
and mundane objects can be seen in many different works, extending from the ‘golden
chain’ in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio) to the stellar rays of Al-Kindi’s De
radiis. This way of thinking was common to the early modern thinker. As we mentioned
earlier, Ficino saw the cosmos as an animal: “Most important, the cosmos is itself an animal
more unified than any other animal, the most perfect animal.”81
This analogy was his way of
understanding the doctrine of correspondences. Each part of the world was related to every
other part, because they participated in a whole, the body of the cosmos. For the
Renaissance individual like Ficino, Cassirer wrote, there was a new way of relating this
doctrine of correspondence, through a ‘new astrological vision’ of the world. Through his
79
Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 254. 80
Kaske and Clark, “Introduction,” Three Books on Life, 38. 81
Ficino, Three Books on Life, 251.
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own modifications made on the doctrine of stellar rays, Ficino was able to involve the
individual “consciousness” in the deterministic discourse, in order to bring the microcosm
closer to the macrocosm. In Ficino’s De vita libri tres the system of astrology “begins with
the thought that inasmuch as the world is not an aggregate of dead elements but rather an
animate being, there can be in it no mere ‘parts’ that possess an independent existence next
to and outside the whole. What appears externally to be a part of the universe is, when more
deeply grasped, to be understood as an organ possessing its definite place and its necessary
function in the whole complex of life of the cosmos.”82
Each part of the microcosm is an
expression of the whole, governed by a hierarchal order to the cosmos. This “emanatistic
sort of physics” Cassirer sees as evident in the Picatrix, one of Ficino’s sources for his third
book on life, De vita coelitus comparanda.83
Eva Baer, in her article “Representations of ‘Planet-Children’ in Turkish
Manuscripts,” pointed out the similarity to the descriptions of the planets and professions in
the Picatrix with the depictions of the Children of the Planets in the Kitāb al-Bulhān (Book
of Wonderment), which we will discuss in detail in chapter 2.84
Baer saw an obvious lineage
between the Children of the Planet depictions and the concept of correspondences between
planets and individual characteristics described in the Picatrix. The Picatrix had long been a
suspect of influence on Ficino’s work, since Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, and Hellmut Ritter
pointed this out in 1922, but this was not confirmed for many decades.85
This work was well
known among 15th
century authors and continued to gain repute throughout the
Renaissance, even though it was never published. It is an amalgam of supposedly over 200
different sources, according to its own introduction, collecting the knowledge of the ancient
82
Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, 113. 83
Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, 110. 84
Eva Baer, “Representations of ‘Planet-Children’ in Turkish Manuscripts,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies 31, no. 3 (1968): 526–533. 85
Kaske and Clark, “Introduction,” Three Books on Life, 45. See Hellmut Ritter, “Picatrix, ein arabisches
Handbuch hellenistischer Magie,” Vortrage der Bibliothek Warburg 1 (1921/1922): 94–124.
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sages, from “Chaldeans, Nabateans, Egyptians, Greeks, Turks, and Hindus.”86
It was
attributed to Maslama al-Majriti (d. 1007)87
by Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), but it is now
known to date to a few decades after his death.88
It was translated from Arabic first into
Spanish, at the court of Alfonso X, in 1256, and later into Hebrew and Latin.89
Its
mysterious title in Latin, Picatrix,90
was also thought to be the name of its author (as we will
see Ficino believed), who is still unknown. It includes primarily Hermetic and Neoplatonic
philosophies and draws largely on the epistles of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā (Brethren of Purity),
De imaginibus by Thābit ibn Qurra al-Ḥarrānī (826–901), Jābir ibn Hayyān (721–815), Abû
Ma‘shar (787–886), the Pseudo-Ptolemaic Centiloquium, and the Pseudo-Aristotelian Kitāb
al-Isṭamāṭīs amongst others.91
The discovery of a letter in which Ficino explained that he
had incorporated all of the useful parts of the Picatrix into his third book finally confirmed
the assumption that much of his De vita coelitus comparanda had been drawn from the
Picatrix.92
Ficino dictated (to Michele Acciari) in this letter to Filippo Valori, who was
hoping to borrow a copy of the Picatrix, saying that he had already returned the book to
‘Georgio,’93
but that there was no need to read it as he had “transferred it to those books he
himself composed…whatever is in any way useful or important in that work, may be read
point for point perhaps better and certainly more fully and clearly in his own book De vita.
86
John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock, Picatrix: Liber Atratus Edition (n.p.: Adocentyn Press,
2010/11), 3.5. 87
Raquel M. Diez discusses the possibility of Qadi Sa’id al-Andalusi (1029–1070) as the author. Raquel M.
Diez, “Alfonso X el sabio: Picatrix (Ms. Vaticano Reginensus Latinus 1283a),” (PhD diss., New York Univ.,
1995), 12 [Warburg FBH 295.D32]. 88
Specifically 1047–1051 AD. Garin, Astrology and the Renaissance, 46. 89
Recently Charles Burnett informed me that a Hebrew manuscript of the Picatrix has been discovered to
predate the Latin by Reimund Leicht. His publication on the matter is forthcoming. See also, Reimund Leicht,
Astrologumena Judaica: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der astrologischen Literatur der Juden (Tuebingen:
Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. K, 2007). 90
Henry Kahane, Renée Kahane, and Angelina Pietrangeli, “Picatrix and the Talismans,” Romance Philology
19, no. 4 (1966): 574–593. 91
Pingree, “Some of the Sources of the Ghāyat al-hakīm,” 7. 92
Daniela Delcorno Branca, “Un discepolo de Poliziano Michele Acciari,” Lettere italiane 28 (1976): 468–
481. For the letter see, MS Florence, Nazionale, Filza Rinuccini 17, Insert 6, fols. 8v–9v, Letter II. 93
As to the identity of ‘Georgio,’ Paola Zambelli has offered Giorgio Anselmi da Parma the elder, rather than
the alternative guess of Delcorno Branca, Giorgio Cipro. Zambelli points to the fact that Anselmi da Parma
and his son authored and tried, unsuccessfully, to publish a work based on the Picatrix. See, Paola Zambelli,
White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance: From Ficino, Pico, Della Porta to Trithemius,
Agrippa, Bruno (Boston: Brill, 2007). Also, Branca, “Un discepolo de Poliziano Michele Acciari.”
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If you reflectively and carefully read the latter, you won’t miss a thing from…the famous
Picatrix.”94
The favorite subject of the Picatrix is planet correspondences, including which
professions they are each associated with, the proper prayers to the planets, and lists of how
they should be depicted in images. In this way it is very much a predecessor to the Children
of the Planets concept, where practically every correspondence that is portrayed in Children
of the Planets illustrations is mentioned explicitly or suggested in the Picatrix.95
Ficino uses
the passages about the images proper to each planet in his third book, detailing passages of
the Picatrix in 3.18, for example, to acquire a long life one would make an image of Saturn
on sapphire with Saturn rising: “The form was this: an old man sitting on a rather high
throne or on a dragon, his head covered with a dark linen cloth, raising his hands above his
head, holding in his hand a sickle or a some fish, and clothed in a dusky robe.”96
We will
recognize this description in the image we have of the illustrated Picatrix (see Images 12–
18). Here he shows some hesitation about their usage, but defends them even pointing to the
Speculum for support. He claims they are effective regardless and points to a story that
Iamblichus gave of a certain Olympius, a magician who wanted to “planet-strike”
(siderare)97
Plotinus through the use of similar images. Ficino says the attempt backfired,
and Olympius “planet-struck” himself instead, because Plotinus was somehow protected
from the dangerous influence of the planet, by his own genuine nature.98
De vita coelitus comparanda claims to be a commentary on Plotinus (205–270),
probably Ennead 4.3.11, “On the difficulties about the Soul.”99
In actuality it is as much a
commentary on Plotinus as it is of two other works, one being the Picatrix and the other
94
Kaske and Clark, “Introduction,” Three Books on Life, 85, fn. 2. Original: “ea in libros quos ipse de vita
composuit transtulisse…quum praesertim quae in eo ipso opere lucidiusque, legantur in illo ipso libro quem
De vita inscripsit quem quidem si diligentissime volveris, nihil…a Picatrice illo…desiderabis.” (MS Florence,
Nazionale, Filza Rinuccini 17, Insert 6, fols. 8v–10v, Letter II). 95
For explicit examples, see Baer, “Representations of ‘Planet-Children’ in Turkish Manuscripts,” 526–533. 96
Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.18:335–337. 97
340, line 125. 98
Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.18:341. 99
It could also be a commentary on 3.4.5, “On our allotted guardian Spirit,” as well, being as this is also the
subject of 3.22 of De vita coelitus comparanda. Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press – Loeb Classical Library, 1967), 153–155.
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being the Asclepius.100
4.3.11 is the only place that Plotinus discussed calling gods into
statues, what Ficino saw as an allusion to the “god-making” passages of the Asclepius,101
a
Greek Hermetic text that was known throughout the Middle Ages, unlike the bulk of the
Corpus Hermeticum, in its Latin translation. The Asclepius discussed, in a dialogue
between Hermes Trismegistus and his adepts, a means toward achieving true knowledge of
the divine. The most important and most secret way to contact the divine nature was
through the practice of animating statues and drawing down the spirits of celestial beings
(daemones) into them, described in passages 24 and 37. Many authors who valued the
Hermetic writings, wanting perhaps to incorporate them into a broad canon of ‘ancient
wisdom,’ like Augustine or Lactantius (240–320), wrote about the Asclepius, struggling
with the meaning of these passages. Ficino, valuing the Hermetic writings as ancient
wisdom, tried to harmonize these difficult passages with his specific Christian philosophy.
His translations of the Corpus Hermeticum reintroduced the Hermetic writings and ushered
in what some scholars saw as a ‘Neo-Hermetic’ movement.102
One of the few other places
that we find the kind of practice described in the Asclepius, drawing down celestial spirits
into statues (aside from commentaries on the Asclepius), is in the Picatrix, and this is
probably why Ficino combined his knowledge of the Picatrix with his commentary on
Plotinus’s discussion of this subject in his third book.
IV. The Perfection of the Self and ‘Perfect Nature’
An additional subject that both of these works share, the Picatrix and Asclepius, with
Ficino’s De vita coelitus comparanda is the pursuit of the perfection of the self. This topic,
which has come to define Renaissance humanism, was of primary importance to Ficino’s
De vita libri tres. Here he proposed a healthy ‘way of life’ could be achieved by aligning
100
Kaske and Clarke, “Introduction,” Three Books on Life, 29, 47. 101
Whether Plotinus is actually referencing the Asclepius would be interesting as the text itself is dated to
sometime before 300 AD, which could make it contemporary with Plotinus’s own writings. 102
Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
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the individual with the planet that governs them, and through something like one’s
‘daemon,’ in the Socratic sense of the word.
Whoever therefore wants to have the heavens propitious, let him undertake above all this
work, this way of life;…the activity which from tender years you do, speak, play-act, choose,
dream, imitate; that activity which you try more frequently, which you perform more easily, in
which you make the most progress, which you enjoy above all else, which you leave off
unwillingly. That assuredly is the thing for which the heavens and the lord of your horoscope
gave birth to you. Therefore they will promote your undertakings and will favor your life to
the extent that you follow the auspices of the lord of your geniture, especially if that Platonic
doctrine is true (with which all antiquity agrees) that every person has at birth one certain
daemon, the guardian of his life, assigned to his own personal star, which helps him to that
very task to which the celestials summoned him when he was born.103
The path toward the perfection of the self is found in Ficino’s work through a harmony
achieved with the world around us and governed by the stars that we are each born under.
This is probably where Cassirer saw the innate bond between man and planet in Ficino’s
work: “To be sure, there is a bond, says Ficino, that joins every man to ‘his’ planet from the
moment of his birth; and that bond is indestructible.”104
The perfection of the self is achieved in Picatrix by contacting one’s own ‘perfect
nature,’ through one’s pneuma or, again, one’s ‘daemon,’ with the help of an incantation.105
Four pneumata are named for the ‘perfect nature,’ much like the planetary pneumata that are
said to govern one of each of the seven planets and the seven regions of the world, the
Climes. In the Picatrix Hermes (Trismegistus) describes the way in which he found his
perfect nature:
When I wished to understand and draw forth the secrets of the world and of its qualities, I put
myself above a certain pit that was very deep and dark, from which a certain impetuous wind
blew…Then there appeared to me in a dream a beautiful man of imperial authority…I asked
him who he was, and he replied: ‘I am Perfect Nature.’106
After Ficino discusses finding one’s own star or personal daemon in 3.23, he also states that
one must also know “exactly what region your star and your daemon initially designated
you to dwell in and cultivate, because there they will favor you more. Assuredly, it is that
region in which, as soon as you reach it, your spirit is somehow refreshed through and
103
Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.23:371. 104
Cassirer, Individual and the Cosmos, 113. 105
Greer and Warnock, Picatrix, 3.2:136–138. 106
Greer and Warnock, Picatrix, 3.6:150.
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through.”107
The professions and finding the daemon of one’s destined profession are
described here. These are related to a specific place that each person is allotted to. One must
be in the right place, in the right profession, to be able to find their genius, the progenitor of
their life, their daemon. This is interesting to us, of course, because of the association of the
Children of the Planets with the human professions, which they are generally seen to depict.
“As far as pertains to dwelling and profession, that saying of the Oriental astrologers is by
no means to be scorned, namely, that by change of name, profession, habits, manner of
living, and place, the celestial influence can be changed…The astrologers agree with the
Platonists that the guardian daemons of every individual whatsoever can be two, the one
proper to his nativity, the other to his profession.”108
This section harks back strongly to 3.7
and 3.9 of the Picatrix. Here the Climes (geographical locations) are related to the
professions associated with each planet, as well as the Term (divisions of sky into 60 areas).
Ficino mentions the Terms explicitly in his description of how to find one’s daemon through
their horoscope, by locating its Term from the Ascendant, “to whatever star that term
belongs, they think your daemon belongs to it too.”109
The pneumata of the planets are
described as each having governance over one of the six directions of each planet, with an
additional seventh spirit which governs them all (3.9). This comes just after the discussion
on how to find one’s perfect nature (3.6). It seems a very reasonable proposition that this is
another place that we can point to a borrowing from the Picatrix, or direct commentary,
where chapter 3.23 of De vita corresponds closely to chapter 3.9 of the Picatrix. It is in this
and the surrounding chapters that the Picatrix describes how to contact each planet,
depending on one’s purposes, through the use of different spells involving correspondences,
and most interestingly, by dressing like the planet itself. In the case of Saturn, “when you
want to speak to Saturn…dress in black…also wear a black cap of the sort that doctors
wear, and you should wear black shoes…have an iron ring in your hand, and carry an iron
107
Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.22:373. 108
Ficino, Three Books on Life 3.23:373. 109
Ficino, Three Books on Life 3.23:373.
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thurible [incense burner] with you.”110
The emulation of the planet in all of his/her
characteristics is the most important aspect of the prayers described in this book.
Charles Burnett describes a logic similar to that in Ficino’s De vita coelitus
comparanda found in the theology of the Picatrix111
: “They believed that God as prime
cause was so far removed above humankind that man could only reach him through
intermediaries, which were, for them, the planets.”112
We can argue that this same need for
intermediaries is also a result of a Ptolemaic cosmology, where the primum mobile is
farthest from the earth.
Ficino explicitly connected this farthest sphere to the individual soul, writing that the
primum mobile was the soul, “Soul is led most easily of all, since she is the Primum Mobile
and movable of herself, of her own accord.”113
This is how he solved the problem in another
way of the distance between free will and divine will. It is the soul that unites body and
intellect through a contagious attraction.114
“Finally let no one believe that absolutely all
gifts are drawn from the Soul…But if he employs things which pertain to this star and
daemon,…And he undergoes this influence not only through the rays of the star and the
daemon themselves, but also through the very Soul of the World everywhere present…the
World-soul constructed in the heavens besides the stars, figures…and she impressed
properties on all of these.”115
110
Greer and Warnock, Picatrix, 3.7:159. 111
Burnett ascribes this way of thinking specifically to the Sabaeans of Harran, a Syriac-speaking religious
community, combining Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and talismanic religious practices, a branch of which were
established in Baghdad following the teachings of Thabit ibn Qurra. Burnett sees this as a likely candidate for
an environment in which the Picatrix could have originated. Charles Burnett, “Arabic, Greek, and Latin Works
on Astrological Magic Attributed to Aristotle,” in Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and
Techniques in the Islamic and Christian Worlds (Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996), 87. 112
Burnett, “Arabic, Greek, and Latin Works on Astrological Magic Attributed to Aristotle,” 87. 113
Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.1:243. 114
Ficino, Three Books on Life, 243–244. 115
Ficino, Three Books on Life, 245.
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V. Prisca Theologia and Philosophia Perennis
Ficino often felt he had to justify his use of astrology, even with an “Apology” following
book three of De vita, where he writes: “Someone will therefore say: Marsilio is a priest?
Isn’t he? Indeed he is. What business then do priests have with medicine or, again, with
astrology? Another will say: What does a Christian have to do with magic or images? And
someone else, unworthy of life, will begrudge life to the heavens.”116
He defends his cause
in three counts, first, by saying that the “ancient priests of long ago were doctors as well as
astronomers,”117
and that his purpose is clearly medicinal; second, he reminds the reader
that he is merely summarizing previous writers, such as Plotinus; and last, he points out that
there are two kinds of magic, that which makes use of daemons, which he calls “inquisitive”
magic, and that which makes use of natural material and natural causes, being “necessary”
magic.118
He claims to be practicing only the second of these, where magic is only used for
achieving good health, which is a necessity. Of course, Ficino does contradict himself here,
for, as we have discussed, he describes in detail in De vita how to make use of daemons
toward the benefit of the good life as well.
The first defense is connected to another concept, prisca theologia, which, it turns out,
is a phrase first used by Ficino. I suggest that it is this prisca theologia that provides Ficino
the forum for his astrological solution to the problem of free will. He is able to condone
astrological practices that allow for greater free will, and incorporate these ideas into his
own Christianity as a result of his pursuit of the prisca theologia. Thus we can say that
Ficino’s prisca theologia is what allows him to understand his relationship to the heavens as
a child of the planets. The concept of prisca theologia (ancient theology) expresses the
belief in the idea that a sacred knowledge has been handed down through the ages, and can
be retrieved from certain writings in antiquity, and defined by the ‘sages’ of these texts.
116
Ficino, “An Apology Dealing with Medicine, Astrology, the Life of the World, and the Magi Who Greeted
the Christ Child at His Birth,” in Three Books on Life, 395–401, 395. 117
Ficino, “Apology,” in Three Books on Life, 397. 118
Ficino, “Apology,” in Three Books on Life, 399.
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Having come across the term repeatedly in my research, I felt I had to find its provenance in
scholarship. How was it related to the term philosophia perennis, or prisca sapientia? I was
confident that the idea and variations of the term were in use in Renaissance sources, but
was unsure of the term’s use prior to this, and in addition I thought there might be a
possibility that its wider dispersion may have taken place at a much later date.
It turns out both of these assumptions are the case. In the recently published work by
Wouter Hanegraaf, Esotericism and the Academy, we find an examination of the difference
between and origin of the use of the terms prisca theologia and philosophia perennis, which
he describes as types of ‘grand narratives’ that eventually fell out of popularity by the
beginning of the 18th
century.119
We find the first use of the term prisca theologia and the
popularization of the idea in Ficino, though its wider use in scholarship is attributed to D. P.
Walker in the 20th
century.120
The term philosophia perennis, which was first introduced by
Agostino Steuco in 1540, again was put into scholarly use later, in 1966 by Charles Schmitt.
The terms are often synonymous, but if we follow Hanegraaf’s logic we can see the
difference, where prisca theologia is defined by Charles Schmitt, as “true knowledge”
handed down from the prisci (ancient sages) to Christianity, i.e., “from Orpheus to
Aglaophemus to Pythagoras and, finally, to Plato,”121
and implicating periods where
knowledge has been lost, while philosophia perennis says the same knowledge can be found
in every period.
The difference is slight and I am not sure that Hanegraaf’s definitions cannot be
easily inverted between terms. For example, Schmitt writes of the terms prisca sapientia
119
Wouter Hanegraaf, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6. See also chapter 1, fn. 7: “D. P. Walker claimed to have ‘launched’ the
term in 1954 (Ancient Theology, 1, n. 1, referring to his groundbreaking ‘Prisca Theologia in France’), but it
appears literally in Marsilio Ficino’s writings, for example ‘De laudibus philosophiae’ (Opera, 768: ‘Prisca
vera Aegyptiorum et Arabum theologia’); Argumentum to the Pimander; or De Christiana religione 22
(Opera, 25: ‘Prisca Gentilium Theologia’).” 120
Though Walker used this term to mean something a bit different. See Hanegraaf, Esotericism and the
Academy, chapter 1, p. 6, fn. 5: “As emphasized by Walker in the opening sentence of his classic study on the
prisca theologia tradition: ‘By the term “Ancient Theology” I mean a certain tradition of Christian apologetic
literature which rests on misdated texts’ (Walker, Ancient Theology, 1).” 121
Hanegraaf, Esotericism and the Academy, 8.
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and prisca theologia, saying that the first is “a very high level of wisdom” while the latter
he says is basically the same as Steuco’s philosophia perennis; “It turns out to be little more
than prisca theologia in slightly novel dress…the word ‘priscus,’ probably best translated as
‘venerable,’ is one which reoccurs often in Steuco.”122
Hanegraaf applies this discussion on
prisca theologia to the idea that the ancients were somehow closer to interacting directly
with the divine, and the popular tendency to attribute this “direct mystical access to the
divine”123
to oriental sources. This way of thinking, he points out, is where ‘Platonic
Orientalism,’ a term coined recently by John Waldbridge in 2001, stems from. Hanegraaf
examines this “Platonism understood as ancient ‘divine wisdom derived from the Orient’”
throughout Esotericism and the Academy, paralleling it to understandings of prisca
theologia, where “all the important Greek philosophers up to and including Plato had
received their philosophy from these sources…countless testimonies confirmed that Plato
himself and all his notable predecessors had personally traveled to Egypt, Babylon, Persia,
and India, where they had studied with priests and sages.”124
We can see tendencies of this
perceived lineage, Walbridge explains, by the late Hellenistic period, when it would have
been basically commonplace to believe that the Magi that attended Christ at his birth were
the descendants of ancient Persian philosophers, such as Zoroaster. Ficino paralleled the
translation of texts into Latin to this genealogy of knowledges in one of his letters to
Cosimo de’ Medici, saying “Plato’s spirit, living in his writings, had left Byzantium to fly
like a bird to Cosimo in Florence.”125
Certainly the Picatrix could be headed under the
category of Platonic Orientalism. Charles Burnett discusses both the real and the fictitious
attributions of some of the sources of the Picatrix, to Indian and Persian antecedents, but
also how many texts, that were originally composed in Arabic, like the Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs
(a source of the Picatrix which we will discuss in chapter II), were attributed to Aristotle.
122
William W. Quinn, The Only Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 78. 123
Hanegraaf, Esotericism and the Academy, 14. 124
Hanegraaf, Esotericism and the Academy, 14, fn. 29. 125
Ficino, ‘Proemium,’ in vol. 2 of Supplement Ficinianum, ed. Paul Kristeller (Florence: Leo S. Olschki,
1937), 104–105.
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In the work of the Arabic translator, Hermann of Carinthia (1100–1160), we see Hermes
and Asclepius described as pupils of the “Indian King Agathodaimon.”126
This shows how
Greek works acquired an ‘oriental lineage,’ and Arabic texts attributed to Aristotle acquired
a Greek one. One of the things that results from all this is an affinity for the use of
intermediary gods in cosmological writings, which was incidentally ushered in through the
interaction and transmission of these texts. Yossef Schwartz summarized this point in a
recent CEU lecture:
The cosmological framework developed by Arab (Moslem as well as Jewish) philosophers,
formed a complex causal and spatial system, in which the anthropological model of body –
soul – intellect became a general metaphysical principle integrated into a unified universal
order. The mythical figure of the (Koranic or Biblical) angel was an integral part of this
cosmic natural order. Intelligences or separate substances were conceived as parts of the
mechanism of divine creation and providence.127
This plays into our earlier discussion in which the Children of the Planets acted as
intermediaries of the divine will. Ficino practiced, if only in his writings, the belief that
through the aid of the planets, we may be able to operate on our own futures through right
living. That is, if we act out our parts as the offspring of the planet that governed our
nativity, we will imitate the cause that was laid out for us by God, through the heavens.
VI. Pico della Mirandola’s De homnis dignitate
We cannot finish this chapter without the mention of one of Ficino’s comtemporaries, Pico
della Mirandola (1463–1494), the infamous humanist philosopher that defended natural
philosophy, religion, and magic with his 900 theses and whose De homnis dignitate
(Oration on the Dignity of Man) addresses exactly our subject here. Frances Yates said
about this work that it echoed the “great character of Renaissance magic, of the new type of
magic introduced by Ficino and completed by Pico.”128
There he treats the topics of free
126
Burnett, “Arabic, Greek, and Latin Works on Astrological Magic Attributed to Aristotle,” 87. 127
Yossef Zvi Schwartz, “Migration of Knowledge and the Limits of Appropriation: On the Latin Rejection of
Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic Cosmology” (lecture at Medieval Studies Department, Central European
University, Budapest, Sept. 29, 2010). 128
Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 86.
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will, man as intermediary, and the astral orders, beginning with the creation of man. Pico
opens his opus with the Asclepius and a touch of Platonic Orientalism,
Most esteemed Fathers, I have read in the ancient writings of the Arabians that Abdala the
Saracen on being asked what, on this stage, so to say, of the world, seemed to him most
evocative of wonder, replied that there was nothing to be seen more marvelous than man.
And that celebrated exclamation of Hermes Trismegistus, “What a great miracle is man,
Asclepius” confirms this opinion.129
After a moment of hesitation Pico reveals that the reason man is so worthy is because of his
free will. Pico writes that God had run out of room, had no where to put man, so he put him
in the middle of everything, and had him share accordingly in everything that God had
created. He was thus in this way also an intermediary.
that man is the intermediary between creatures, that he is the familiar of the gods above him
as he is the lord of the beings beneath him; that, by the acuteness of his senses, the inquiry
of his reason and the light of his intelligence, he is the interpreter of nature, set midway
between the timeless unchanging and the flux of time; the living union (as the Persians say),
the very marriage hymn of the world, and, by David's testimony but little lower than the
angels.130
Pico explains that in man’s creation that God had run out of archetypes when he decided to
create this last special creature to look on the rest of creation. In his own colorful language,
“He had already adorned the supercelestial region with Intelligences, infused the heavenly
globes with the life of immortal souls and set the fermenting dung-heap of the inferior world
teeming with every form of animal life.”131
Man was at first formless, without imprint like
the other creatures, and therefore completely in control of his own free will. He was able to
choose what things to be influenced by. In contrast to the planets, man was not susceptible
to fate alone: “The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon
thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities.
But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all
possibilities, the germs of every form of life.”132
Pico’s philosophy has a striking difference
from Ficino’s, because for Pico, even the planets bow to man. The celestial gods are only a
129
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Caponigri (Washington DC:
Regnery Gateway, 1956), 3. 130
Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 3. 131
Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 5. 132
Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 8.
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steppingstone on the way to the union with God. We can imitate them though, if we want to
get closer to the divine faster: “[U]nable to yield to them, and impatient of any second place,
let us emulate their dignity and glory. And, if we will it, we shall be inferior to them in
nothing.”133
Like Augustine, Pico was willing to undermine the determination of the stars in
order to get to what he saw as the ultimate goal, the immediate presence of God. As bold as
this seems there is also an extreme piety throughout this work of Pico’s, where theology is
praised at times above natural philosophy, and where man can take the place of a planet to
find his way, through natural philosophy to theology: “Summoned in such consoling tones
and invited with such kindness, like earthly Mercuries, we shall fly on winged feet to
embrace that most blessed mother.”134
In fact, he makes natural philosophy inseparable
from theology. Pico makes the path toward ‘true knowledge’ tripartite, saying that the three
aphorisms written above the entrance to the ancient temple of Delphi represent three types
of philosophy: μηδέν άγαν (meden agan, nothing in excess), being moral philosophy,
γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnosi sauton, know thyself), referring to the present philosophy of man’s
dignity, and εἶ (ei, thou art), representing natural philosophy combined with theology.
Yates discussed Pico’s magia naturalis as a concept close to what we have mentioned
earlier, a natural form of religion, combined with ritual practices.135
Yates thought that Pico
would have sought practical means of “establishing ‘links’ between earth and heaven”
through magical praxis, even using talismans and star images, just as she thought Ficino
might have done: “Pico’s natural magic is therefore, it would seem, probably the same as
Ficino’s magic, using natural sympathies but also magical images and signs.”136
Whether
these two individuals were ‘practicing magic’ or medicine is debatable.137
Pico’s own
rejection of astrology in his Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (Disputations
against divinatory astrology) would seem to contradict the astrological elements that Yates
133
Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 13. 134
Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 21 135
Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic, 2–5. 136
Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 89. 137
Kaske and Clark, “Introduction,” Three Books on Life, 54.
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emphasized in Pico’s work, where she pointed to Lynn Thorndike (who with Yates would
emphasize how science is tied to magic, from its naissance) to support her claim, saying,
“these thesis showed that Pico’s thinking ‘was largely coloured by astrology.’”138
Pico’s
problem with astrology was the same as Augustine’s in part, where he would choose the
grace of God over the fate of the stars, but more so he could not tolerate the lack of free will
that was a result from determinism of astrology. Pico discussed the archaic names of the
seven planets and the ‘lots’ of the planets in his Disputationes, and dismissed them as “tales
told by Albumasar.”139
His interest was in a ‘higher’ form of practice. There are many
comparisons we can make between Pico and Ficino, as Paola Zambelli has done in her
work, White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance, where she writes about
them that the “Neoplatonic and Hermetic theories of the two Florentines on the cosmos, the
‘spirit,’ and the forces of nature had given rise to a new idea of magic.”140
Zambelli
understands the two to make the same distinctions about what parts of magic are
permissible: “In order to differ from the popular methods of sorcerers, in 1486, Ficino and
Pico, had claimed the possibility of a purely natural magic, with no invocation of
demons.”141
But ultimately, I think, we must also distinguish some important differences
between the two. Both Pico and Ficino sought to define magic in a particular way,
distinguish what could be acceptable, and they sought to allow for the synthesis of various
religious beliefs. In their explanations of the types of magic that each advocated, their views
on the surface, did not seem so far apart. But looking closely we see that Ficino’s magic was
not Pico’s. Ficino, even though he claims to distinguish daemonic magic from natural
magic, in De vita coelitus comparanda, gives very specific details about how to use one’s
own daemon and the planets to aid in the search for the perfect self. Strangely, the
138
Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 86. Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and
Experimental Science, IV (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953 [1923]), 494. 139
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Disputationes Adversus Astologiam Divinatricem, ed. Eurgenio Garin
(Florence: Vallecchi, 1946). 140
Paola Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance: From Ficino, Pico, Della Porta to
Trithemius, Agrippa, Bruno (Boston: Brill, 2007), 2. 141
Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic, 3.
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difference between Ficino’s and Pico’s solution to the problem of free will was in the
daemonic and astrological element. Zambelli contrasts Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516)
(who will come up later in this thesis) with Pico and Ficino, saying a few years after (in
1499) they made their distinctions about the use of daemons in natural magic “Trithemius
crossed swords with them over this very question.”142
But in reality Ficino and Trithemius
were not so opposed. For Ficino the use of talismans, daemons, and planets were tied
together in the path toward an individual’s growth. Even though for Pico the triumph of the
individual was so important, he separated these things from it. Pico made man the
intermediary, taking out the need for the intermediary planets. In this way he put the
individual man in the place of the planets, giving man a function and position in a
hierarchical order on par with the celestials.
We will see how this network of stars, gods, and human actions was depicted in the
various examples we have of the Children of the Planets motif here, in the following
chapter.
142
Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic, 3.
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Chapter 2
The Children of the Planets in Manuscripts
The study of the iconography of the planets began with Fritz Saxl’s research on the subject,
as we mentioned in our introduction. Rembrandt Duits points out that Saxl’s transmission
theory for the iconography of the planets changed over time, beginning with an
uninterrupted lineage back to ancient Babylon. Even though he first concluded, “that the
late medieval images of the planets are iconographically far removed from the classical
gods who lent the planets their names”143
he looked for a lineage, as he would later find
with the constellation iconography, that would link them to ancient sources. “He boldly
argued that these iconographical types could be traced back straight to the planet deities of
ancient Babylon, where the planet Mercury bore the name Naboo, the god of writing. The
intermediary step, he thought, could be found in the unique pagan cult of the city of
Harran…where elements of Babylonian astrology reportedly survived until well into the
days of Islam; aspects of this cult were transmitted via the 11th
century Arabic book on
magic, the Ghaya.”144
Saxl retracted this view in his 1915 catalogue of astrological
manuscripts,145
partly because of the Kraków Picatrix. Warburg had recently discovered the
connection between the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm and the Latin Picatrix, and in 1912 an illustrated
copy of the Picatrix was discovered in Cracow (BJ 793). The illustrations however did not
attest to any marked influence from any Arabic sources, but looked rather to be the
inventions of an individual scribe (see Images 12–18). This resulted in Saxl’s revised theory
for the transmission of the Children of the Planets, which was more specific than his theory
of the planets, where he believed the Children of the Planets images to be “a conflation of
two traditions: the Arabic astrological tradition of assigning specific human activities to the
143
Duits, “Reading the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” Journal of Art Historiography 5
(2011): 3. 144
Duits, “Reading the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” 3. 145
Fritz Saxl, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters in
römischen Bibliotheken (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1915), xiii–xiv.
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domains of the planets, and the Western pictorial tradition of the labours of the months.”146
Duits points out that even though Saxl ultimately failed to explain the iconography of the
planets through an uninterrupted transmission theory, he still attempted the same approach
with the Children of the Planets. “In spite of his own earlier failure with the iconography of
the planets themselves, he also declared once again that we should be thinking in terms of a
direct intercultural transmission of images rather than of an intercultural transmission of
texts with separate illustration traditions in each culture.”147
Finally, Saxl theorized a parallel transmission of the Children of the Planets images
from Oriental tomb reliefs to Hellenistic depictions,148
then through Arabic texts via Spain
to the West, and lastly into a synthesis of East and West in Italian fresco imagery. We could
compare this theory to something like the “exchange of glances” (Blickwechsel) that Hans
Belting mentions in his recent work Florence and Baghdad.149
Instead of influence and
difference we have an exchange of ideas between cultures that produces new forms of
knowledge and new iconographies. Even if Saxl was still interested in influence, he
attempted here to say that there were parallel influences and therefore a shared lineage of
more than one culture in the planetary iconographies. Later Saxl added to this theory some
details about the tabular form seen in some examples of the motif, as in the Kitāb al-Bulhān
(see Image 25) and the frescos of the Paduan Salone (see Image 31), saying that this graph
formation in the Children of the Planets motif was an Arabic invention, which the Salone
adapted and combined to create the Italian imagery.150
Saxl had a good reason for his
suspicions that the Children of the Planets came in part from Islamic models. He saw a
tradition of writings that described the professions along side the Climes, those different
regions of the world governed by each of the seven planets. Saxl pointed to other depictions
146
Duits, “Reading the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” 5. 147
Duits, “Reading the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” 6. 148
Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art,” 242, 244. 149
Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard
University Press, 2011), 3. 150
Duits, “Reading the Stars of the Renaissance: Fritz Saxl and Astrology,” 7.
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of the Children of the Planets in Islamic manuscripts, those in the Paris manuscript, Kitāb
al-maṭāli‘ al-sa‘āda wa-yanābī‘ al-Sayyāda (‘Book of ascensions of bliss and the fountains
of Lordship,’ or ‘Book of Felicity,’ BNF Suppl. Turc. 242) (see Image 29).151
He did not
know at the time that, along with another example in New York (PM M. 788), these were
Ottoman Turkish translations derived from the Kitāb al-Bulhān. But just because the
examples are rare does not mean Saxl’s assumptions were wrong. We can point to earlier
descriptions of the Climes related to the professions in the Kitāb Gharā’ib al-fun n wa-
mula al-’uy n (Book of Curiosities, 12th
/13th
c. MS, composed before 1050 AD, Bodleian
MS Arab. C. 90).152
This is a richly illustrated text, sharing some motifs with that of the
Kitāb al-Bulhān, as in the figure of the ‘Waq Waq Tree.’153
Unfortunately the Climes and
planets are not illustrated in the Kitāb Gharā’ib al-fun n, though they would have been at
one time, as the text indicates missing illustrations.154
The Kitāb al-Bulhān illustrations also
lack enough accompanying text to be able to compare, only having the brief title, “A
discourse on the Professions,” along with the names of the planets, and “A discourse of the
Climes.” Unlike his constellation theory, where he succeeded comprehensively and with
great amounts of evidence in mapping the development of the iconography of the star
groups from the Renaissance through the middle ages and back to antiquity, Saxl was never
able to fully explain the Children of the Planets. This was due to a number of reasons, one
being his early death at age 58, as well as his continual dedication to maintaining the
Warburg Institute and Library, managing its relocation from Hamburg to London, and
taking over its direction during Warburg’s mental illness and confinement. Saxl and Hans
151
There is a facsimile edition of this manuscript. The Book of Felicity: Matali’ al-saadet, Barcelona: Moliero,
2012 (ISBN: 978-84-96400-36-8). 152
Emilie Savage-Smith and Yossef Rapoport, eds., The Book of Curiosities: A critical edition (March 2007),
accessed on May 29, 2012, http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/bookofcuriosities. Also, Rapoport and Savage-Smith
that is to be published by Brill Press (Leiden) in their series Studies on Islamic Manuscripts. 153
A mythical tree that bears fruit that looks like human beings. Greer and Warnock, Picatrix, 4.7, 274: “In the
same place [India] is said to be another tree from which, in the spring and fall, voices similar to human voices
are heard to issue, and the roots of that tree are shaped like human beings. For an interesting discussion see
Evelyn Edison and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Views of the Cosmos (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2004),
66. Also, Laura Collins, “Tale of the Waq Waq Tree” (9/1/08), accessed May 27, 2012,
http://surlalunefairytales.yuku.com/topic/750 - .T8KnD66C_3A. 154
See English commentary in Savage-Smith and Rapoport, The Book of Curiosities, fol. 16a, fn. 3.
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Meier publication of the third catalogue of astrological images (1953), where they
categorized the planet iconography into three models, was published only posthumously of
both authors, Meier having an untimely death as well in 1941 during a bombing raid of
London.
Meier and Saxl’s contribution to the studies of the iconography of the planets is still
invaluable and the three categories in which we can place examples of planet illustrations
are extremely helpful when comparing various examples. They described three types of
astrological manuscripts that contained imagery of the planets: 1) those derived from the
Aratea, 2) images derived from Michael Scotus’s works, 3) those from Oriental works. Ewa
Śnieżyńska-Stolot gives us a clear description of these categories in her work Decanal
Planets,155
to which she adds two more categories: 4) the images in an Abû Ma‘shar
manuscript (Fendulus, Sloane 3983, f. 32r-49v), and 5) those images of the Kraków
Picatrix. Śnieżyńska-Stolot points to a difference that emerges between the medieval and
the modern images of the planets. The Aratea type imitate ancient models of the
corresponding Greek deities, and are typically shown riding in chariots drawn by horses (or
other creatures occasionally) (see Image 47). These images correspond to the popular
writings of Ovid. Michael Scotus’ writings contain illustrations that imitate medieval styles
and vocations – king, bishop, knight, scholar, etc. (see Image 51) (Warszawa akc. 9802.
Baw. 46, f.22v-23v; Vienna 2352, f. 27r-31v; Kraków 573, f. 215r; Zurich c 54, f. 24v-30v).
The Scotus type were originally thought by Saxl to be based on Oriental models,156
but
more recently Blume has argued that they are more likely spontaneous creations based on
Scotus’ lively imagination. Their descriptions do however draw a few details from Abû
Ma‘shar astrological almanacs.157
Oriental models are seen either in graph form or in
155
Ewa Śnieżyńska-Stolot, Astrological Iconography in the Middle Ages: The Decanal Planets (Cracow:
Jagiellonian University Press, 2003). 156
T. S. R. Boase, “Review of Catalogue of Astrological and Mythological Illuminated Manuscripts of the
Latin Middle Ages, Manuscripts in English Libraries, vol. iii, by Fritz Saxl, Hans Meier, and Harry Bober,”
The English Historical Review 70, no. 274 (Jan. 1955): 99. 157
Blume, “Michael Scot, Giotto, and the Construction of New Images of the Planets,” 135.
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circular reliefs (see Image 25, 34). These figures exhibit their own features for each planet,
as we mentioned earlier (Saturn as an Indian man; Jupiter, a seated dignitary; Mars, a
warrior with a severed human head; Venus, an ud player; Mercury, a scribe; and Sun and
Moon as a round face) (see Image 25). Fendulus’s Liber astrologiae (Sloane 3983,
illustrated abbreviations of Abû Ma‘shar’s Introductorium maius) shows a similar tendency
to the Scotus type, where they also show a relationship to the Zodiac. Śnieżyńska-Stolot
separates these from the Michael Scotus type. Saxl and Meier speculated that Scotus’
illustrations may have been the source of some of the Abû Ma‘shar imagery later, as seen in
the Paduan frescos (see Image 31), which is a consensus agreed upon today as seen in
Dieter Blume.158
The Picatrix gives four images of each planet (see Image 12), as
mentioned earlier, each based on a different source, according to the author. These are
similar to some Persian miniatures from 15th
and 16th
century manuscripts, in that the
humanoid figures are sitting on animals (dogs, birds, lions, dragons), according to Anna
Caiozzo (see Image 33).159
In the 15th
century, says Śnieżyńska-Stolot, the imagery changes
and we see, for example in the Housebook, figures on horseback in the sky, holding flags
that have animal correspondences on them as emblems of each planet (see Image 1, 2, 4).
Johannes Sacrobosco’s commentary on Michael Scotus (created in Leipzig in 1483) shows
both constellations and the sign that corresponds to each planet as well (Morgan 384, f. 28v-
32r). A special example are the images that accompany the text of the Astrolabium planum
of Peitro d’Abano, specifically Johannes Angelus’ edition, where the images combine
Aratea and possibly even Harranian160
models of deities (Budapest, Germ. 2, f. 20v; C, f.
101v). We will look at this text shortly.
158
Blume, “Michael Scot, Giotto, and the Construction of New Images of the Planets,” 138. 159
Anna Caiozzo, “Rituels théophaniques imagés et pratiques magiques: les anges planétaires dans le
manuscrit persan 174 de Paris.” Studia Iranica 29 (2000): 230, pl. 40 [Warburg FBC 15]. Also, Anna Caiozzo,
Images du ciel d’orient au Moyen Âge: une histoire du zodiaque et de ses représentations dans les manuscrits
du Proche-Orient musulman (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003) [Warburg FAF 700]. 160
Śnieżyńska-Stolot, Astrological Iconography in the Middle Ages, 34.
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Stefano Carboni writes that interestingly the planets themselves were not personified
in art until the 12th
century, the earliest example being an inscribed bronze mirror from
1153, probably Iran. Even though the gods that they are associated with in classical times
were, of course, often depicted, it was not until much later that they were associated with
the celestial objects, the planets themselves.
It was only later on, closer to the Islamic era, that in representations of the planets
themselves they were given a human appearance. In Islamic astrology the role of the planets
was fundamental, and therefore a system of personifications was as necessary, if not more
so, as those of the signs of the Zodiac. Based, once again, on Greek sources, each planet also
was soon associated with a particular color, day of the week, and geographical area, as well
as with one or more occupations, and its personality evolved from these various
characteristics.161
The Children of the Planets however do not appear, as we have said, until the 1399
illustrations in the Kitāb al-Bulhān (see Image 25). We can see a potential predecessor to
the Children of the Planets form in the illustrations of the Kitāb al-Mawālīd (see Image 36,
38). In those of the Keir Collection (Image 36) we see for example in a depiction of “the
discourse on him who is born under the sign of Pisces and Jupiter, in the second Decan
under the influence of Jupiter” three versions of the planet Jupiter accompanying each other.
Jupiter is seen as a fisherman, trying to catch the ‘Big Fish’ (which is what Pisces is called
in Arabic, ‘al-hut’), who is conversing with a figure above him, also Jupiter. These two
figures are haloed, the one above looks down at the other. Beneath them is another Jupiter.
This minor Jupiter sits with the five Planetary Terms (ḥadūd) in a row beneath the central
illustration (see Image 36). The illustration found in the same treatise of the Kitāb al-Bulhān
is similar, where Jupiter sits in a nimbus with a singular fish (see Image 37). In another
manuscript of the Kitâb al-Mawalid (BNF arabe 2583 Abû Ma‘shar)162
of the second Decan
of Pisces shows two Jupiter figures, though here he holds two fish, as is the more common
depiction derived from the constellation (rather than the sign, in the earlier illustrations)
161
Carboni, Following the Stars, 6. 162
Carboni, Following the Stars, 5. This manuscript, produced in Cairo around 1300 AD, was illustrated later,
probably in the 17th
century.
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iconography of Pisces (‘al-samakatan,’ meaning ‘two fish’) (see Image 38).163
The tabular
format in all of these is similar to that which we see in the Children of the Planet
illustrations, and we see the familiar features of the planet deities shared between all of
these examples.
I. The Heritage of Manuscripts and the Contexts of the Images
The Children of the Planets emerge as a popular motif at a very specific time. We do not
find any examples of this motif in manuscripts before the turn of the 15th
century. The motif
becomes very popular in manuscript illuminations, and is even one of the first things to be
printed. The planet figures are depicted performing the human professions, and exhibit the
qualities associated with each planet. They generally illustrate a doctrine of
correspondences, showing the features of each planet, the colors, artifacts, character, and
attributes associated with each.
The importance of the motif, as we have discussed in the previous chapter, is in that
it portrays the idea that the individual has a choice in the making of his own destiny. This is
because each planet child represents a different aspect of the planet, that is, different
possibilities or ways that a planet can have influence over persons born under them. The
purpose of the motif was therefore to provide different ways of life for people to choose
from and to follow. In this way the Children of the Planets served as a device for promoting
a philosophy that allowed a greater amount of freewill in the understanding of astrology.
My belief is that the popularity of the motif stems from a trend in the thought of the time
toward harmonizing individualism with concepts of the divine. Beneficial characteristics
could be harnessed and more negative aspects could be overpowered if a person became
aware of the different features of the planets that governed their nativity.
163
Carboni, Following the Stars, 47.
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The Children of the Planets motif gracefully sums up the astrological knowledge of
the Renaissance period and attests to the renewal of the faith in the stars. Interestingly, we
see the motif in many different contexts, accompanying works on astrology, health, and
religion, and in works that are ascribed to different confessions, Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim. We find the motif next to many different texts, and part of what this chapter will do
is to track down exactly what texts it accompanies. We must note that the motif functions
independently of the texts that it accompanies, usually corresponding to the text only
indirectly. In this way it is in many cases a motif that is independent of any text. One of
those places where it is an independent illustration from the text, and is also our earliest
example, is in the Kitāb al-Bulhān (Book of Well-Being), which is an Arabic manuscript
that is a collection including various astrological, folkloric, and religious treatises. In
oriental manuscripts the motif is very rare, and when we examine closely the three examples
we have, one Arabic and two Ottoman texts, we will come to see that we are really only
speaking of one work in three versions, the Kitāb al-Bulhān. The illustrations in the Kraków
Picatrix (Latin translation of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm) are something I would like to look at in
relation to the Children of the Planets motif. The relationship between the Picatrix and the
Children of the Planets is something that I will try to explain further in the following
chapter. I think that this is an important connection because one of the central ideas of the
Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm is the perfection of the self, which can be accomplished only by
harnessing the power of the individual spirits of the planets and finding ways to bring their
divine influence into daily affairs.
The assumption that the visual motif somehow entered into Western examples
through a work like the Kitāb al-Bulhān must be examined closely. Fritz Saxl and Erwin
Panofsky thought that a text similar to the Kitāb al-Bulhān, perhaps its predecessor, would
have informed the Children of the Planets series found in the frescoes of the Palazzo della
Ragione in Padua, attributed to Giotto (but having been repainted after damage in the 18th
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century).164
This interesting suggestion would be difficult to mend with the research done by
D.S. Rice on the Kitāb al-Bulhān, because at least some of the depictions in it he believed
were inspired by Italian works. Comparing Stefano Carboni’s recent (1988) research on the
Kitāb al-Bulhān165
to these earlier studies helps us to see in one place a comprehensive
assessment of their discoveries. Carboni’s research answers, I think, questions asked by
both scholars. This earliest example, the 1399 Kitāb al-Bulhān, is a special case of the
Children of the Planets motif. It is, along with the two Ottoman Turkish translations of this
work, unique in Islamic manuscripts. I will start here with a closer look at this text before I
go into detail about the Children of the Planets motif in its wider dispersion throughout
Europe. This will tell us firstly what potentially different themes fall under the heading
“Children of the Planets” and will help us define the shared or dissimilar aspects of the
motif in different examples.
First, we should consider how to define the Children of the Planets motif. In the
strict sense, we do not see the motif before the turn of the 15th
century, and then only in
manuscripts. It is then that we start seeing a self-contained illustration in various manuscript
traditions of the seven planets as personified deities accompanied by a series of smaller
planetary figures – their children. This usually includes a specific page layout, where the
planet figure is highlighted at the top of the picture, usually in a circle or haloed somehow,
and is larger than the ‘planet children’ beneath. The prototype for this layout is considered
to be Christine de Pisan’s 1406 Épître d’Othéa (see Image 42). Of course there are many
variations to this basic pattern, sometimes the planet is seen on the facing page from his/her
children, as in the Biblioteca Estense manuscript entitled De Sphaera (see Image 6–11) (MS
Lat. 209). But, as we will see in this chapter, there is a broader definition for the Children of
the Planets that includes any images that depict the correspondences of planets as
personified figures. This comes with usage of the term ‘planet children’ to describe figures
164
Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art,” 245. 165
Carboni, Il Kitāb al-Bulhān di Oxford.
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in other works of art that resemble individual personifications included in the Children of
the Planets motif. This term ‘planet children’ we see, for example, applied to the images in
Abû Ma‘shar’s Flores Astrologiae (see Image 48) (Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch, Cod. Pal.
Germ. 832) and we could add some of the planet figure illustrations from the Picatrix
(Kraków MS BJ 793) to this category.166
In the strict sense then we can ask, “Why does imagery of the Children of the
Planets spontaneously occur only at the turn of the 15th
century?” One suggestion, given by
D.S. Rice in 1954, was that the imagery in the Kitāb al-Bulhān was influenced by imagery
in a northern Italian work, a Latin translation of an Arabic medical treatise. I will give one
possible alternative explanation of why images of the Children of the Planets appeared at
this time, due to cultural developments in the iconography of the Islamic manuscript
tradition, giving examples of other Islamic iconographic themes that only began to be
depicted in the 15th
century.
Additionally, we should first look at the contexts in which they appear. This
following section will be oriented then toward the purpose of elucidating the provenance of
the Children of the Planets motif. I would like to find out whether the motif in European
examples is accompanied by the same texts and ideas that it is in the Arabic and Ottoman
examples and to define the concepts involved therein. Only after accomplishing this can we
then examine the possibility of the Children of the Planets also functioning as visual motif
independent of any text.
II. Kitāb al-Bulhān
The Kitāb al-Bulhān (MS Bodl. Or. 133), which can be translated as ‘Book of Wonderment’
or ‘Book of Well-Being,’167
is a compilation of several different texts, the first of which is
labeled “Kitāb al-Bulhān by Abû Ma‘shar” on a folio preceding the body of the work, made
166
Śnieżyńska-Stolot, Astrological Iconography in the Middle Ages, 33. 167
Rice, “The Seasons and the Labors of the Months in Islamic Art,” 3.
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by a later (17th
century) scribe, and which the rest of the codex has come to be headed
under. I was able to examine this manuscript thoroughly at the Bodleian Library, and found
some important details I will discuss here.
The manuscript was produced in Baghdad sometime between 1382–1410 in the style
of the Jelairid school.168
The introduction of the work tells us that it was composed and
illustrated by ‘Alī ibn al-Hasan, and given to his friend, Diya Husain al-Irbili, who is the
scribe and copier of this particular manuscript. The first portion of the manuscript includes
the “Book of Nativities” (Kitāb al-Mawālīd)169
by Abû Ma‘shar (787–886 AD), and we see
a portrait of Abû Ma‘shar in a later illumination in the work. There are few surviving
illustrated manuscripts of this work by Abû Ma‘shar, this one showing 12 full-page
miniatures (see Image 37).170
This is where we find the multiple images of the planets that
we mentioned earlier, here and in other manuscripts, like the images of Jupiter in the
fragment of the Keir Collection.171
The text that accompanies this image is as follows:
Said the wise [Abû Ma‘shar]: ‘Those born under this decade have a bright complexion and a
tendency to become tanned. Their body is cold and moist, as they belong to a watery and
nocturnal sign in the Zodiac. Their physique is well proportioned, but they tend to gain
weight easily. They change moods often. They tend to work little, since they do not like to
exert effort. They get annoyed easily. When they become attached to a place they like, they
do not want to leave it. They love women. They have great strength and are cunning. Allah
knows more.’172
Two other descriptions, one according to Ptolemy and another to Dorotheus, are also given.
In the Kitāb al-Bulhān the Children of the Planets are depicted in two folios
following the Kitāb al-Mawālīd, in the form of a 7 x 8 column graph. The planets are in a
vertical column on the right of the first folio, starting with Saturn, the most distant planet
168
Rice, “The Seasons and the Labors of the Months in Islamic Art,” 3. 169
Carboni, Il Kitāb al-Bulhān di Oxford. 170
Carboni, Following the Stars, 5. Those illustrations in the manuscript of the Keir Collection (MS Keir
Collection, late 14th
c., Baghdad) show 36. These two examples are the earliest illustrations of this work in
manuscripts, to the best of my knowledge. 171
The Keir fragment is part of a dispersed manuscript. This portion was found by the owner of the Keir
Collection, Edmund de Unger (died last year), in a Paris used bookstore. The other half of the dispersed
manuscript belonged to the Oriental Institute of Sarajevo, until it was destroyed by the bombing of the Institute
during the siege of Sarajevo. See Carboni, Following the Stars, 46. 172
Carboni, Following the Stars, 47: “Pisces – First decade (from The Book of Nativities by Abû Ma‘shar).”
This translation is Carboni’s taken from the BNF manuscript Arab 2583.
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from Earth, and ending with the Moon, closest to Earth. The horizontal columns extending
from each of the planets show seven figures (7 figures x 7 planets), contained in his/her own
box, which are our Children of the Planets (see Image 25). These are usually described as
portraying the human professions, but sometimes as the seven qualities of man, each
according to his/her respective planet. They show, for example, Saturn, associated with the
color black and trades that are laborious, such as a blacksmith or stone-mason; Jupiter, with
the color white, associated with religion and good judgment, represented by a judge or
hermit; Mars, associated with red and war, as an executioner; the Sun, associated with gold
and nobility, shows a king; Venus, associated with art and music, is represented as different
musicians and dancers; Mercury, associated with scribes and craftsmen, is a manuscript
illuminator; the Moon, associated with water, is depicted by fishermen.
Eva Baer in her 1968 article, “Representations of the ‘Planet Children’ in Turkish
Manuscripts,”173
pointed to two other manuscripts (with the help of D.S. Rice, who we will
return to shortly), which are Ottoman Turkish translations of the Kitāb al-Bulhān
commissioned by Murad III for his daughters, Fatima and Ayse, entitled the Kitāb al-
maṭāli‘ al-sa‘āda wa-yanābī‘ al-Sayyāda (Book of ascensions of bliss and the fountains of
Lordship, 1582, BNF Suppl. Turc. 242, PM M. 788). This realization, that we are really
only speaking of one work in three versions, the Kitāb al-Bulhān translated into two
Ottoman Turkish versions, is something that for some reason has only gradually come to be
understood about these three manuscripts. Aside from Stefano Carboni’s comprehensive
work on the Kitāb al-Bulhān published in 1988 there are no other in-depth discussions on
the Children of the Planets in this work.174
To my knowledge the Kitāb al-Bulhān is the
earliest (and the only, aside from these two translations) example of the Children of the
Planets in Islamic iconography. To be clear, there are, of course, other examples of planet
173
Eva Baer, “Representations of ‘Planet-Children’ in Turkish Manuscripts,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies 31, no. 3 (1968): 526–533. 174
Stefano Carboni, Il Kitāb al-Bulhān di Oxford.
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figures elsewhere (lacking their ‘children’) in many Arabic, Persian, and Turkish
manuscripts, for example in Qazwini’s Ajā'ib al-makhl qāt wa gharā'ib al-mawj dāt
(known as the ‘Wonders of Creation’).175
There was an established tradition of depicting the
planets with certain features that we see repeated in the Kitāb al-Bulhān: Saturn as an
Indian man with a pickaxe, Mars as a warrior with a human head in his right hand, Jupiter as
a seated king, Venus as an ud player, Mercury as a scribe. But these examples do not show
the seven additional planet figures alongside the planets themselves, which defines our
motif. Interestingly, even depictions of the planets only began to appear in the 12th
century,
with the bulk of examples from the 13th
/14th
century, in Islamic iconography.176
One of the most interesting observations made by Baer in her article was that the
text which describes the planets in the same fashion as they are depicted in the Kitāb al-
Bulhān is the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm.177
She notes that there “are seven categories of professions
or trades within the domination of the seven planets. Based on late Hellenistic tradition
preserved, for instance, in the famous treatises on alchemy and magic, the so-called
‘Picatrix,’ these professions are determined by the qualities attributed to their respective
planetary lord.”178
Baer did not go into detail in justifying the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm as the
source for the Kitāb al-Bulhān images, but we can agree with the implicit similarity if we
look at certain passages which mention some of these professions specifically.179
The
planets are often described in the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm with instructions on how to make images
of them. Saturn for example “is used to ask for needs that you desire from chieftains,
nobles, presidents, kings, old people and dead people,…peasants, builders, slaves,
175
Or, more precisely, “Marvels of Creatures and Strange things Existing,” cod. Monacensis 464, date: 1280.
See, Fritz Saxl, “Beitrage zu einer Geschichte der Planetendarstellungen im Orient und im Okzident,” Der
Islam 3 (1912), 151–177. 176
Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art,” 245. 177
As we have mentioned in the previous chapter, this is the Arabic original of the Latin Picatrix, and was
probably written in the 11th
century. David Pingree, “Some of the Sources of the Ghāyat al-hakīm,” 2; Willy
Hartner, “Notes On Picatrix,” Isis 56, no. 4 (Winter, 1965): 438. 178
Baer, “Representations of ‘Planet-Children’ in Turkish Manuscripts,” 529. 179
For example with Saturn we see tanning, farming, mining, and architecture. See Hellmut Ritter, ed.,
Pseudo-Magriti: Das Ziel des Weisen, I, Arabischer Text (Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1933), 150 – 152,
196, 200.
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thieves,…and every other similar request of the same nature ask for it from Saturn with the
help of a drawing that I make for you.”180
Two works that describe the seven by seven arrangement of the planets, that is,
where each planet has seven planetary “spirits” (perhaps gods or angels) are Ghāyat al-
Ḥakīm and the Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs.181
The Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs, a Pseudo-Aristotelian work,
purported to have been translated in Baghdad by Ḥunayn ibn ’Isḥāq (809–873 AD),182
is the
source for some of the planetary descriptions that Eva Baer pointed to in the Ghāyat al-
Ḥakīm. Charles Burnett shows how a portion of the Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs is excerpted and
depicted in one of the Kitāb al-Bulhān illustrations, the folio depicting the 28 Mansions of
the Moon (the monthly transit of the moon through subdivisions of the Zodiac).183
The
Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm shares the same names for the moon mansions in a similar treatise on the
moon which follows the Children of the Planets folios. This might show some support to
Eva Baer’s attribution of the similarities between text and image in the Children of the
Planets and Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm. The folio with the Moon Mansions comes just two folios after
the Children of the Planets folios, included in a small group of unidentified folios that
follow the Kitāb al-Mawālīd. The Children of the Planets and the Moon Mansion folios
appear to be by the same scribe, but whether they would have originally been from the same
work we will have to decide. If this is a correct assumption, then it could mean that the
Children of the Planets imagery in this Eastern example accompanies an additional text, that
is, the Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs. It is interesting that we find the Children of the Planets in such
close proximity here to a work by Abû Ma‘shar because we know that a text based on the
Introductorium maius by Abû Ma‘shar is commonly appended to Western examples, and
180
Hashem Atallah and William Kiesel, trans., Picatrix Ghayat Al-Hakim, vol. 2 (Seattle: Ouroboros Press,
2008), 63. 181
Pingree, “Some of the Sources of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm,” 1–15. 182
Burnett, “Arabic, Greek, and Latin Works on Astrological Magic Attributed to Aristotle,” 85. 183
Charles Burnett, “The Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs and a Manuscript of Astrological and Astronomical Works of
Barcelona,” and “Herman of Carinthia and the Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs: Further Evidence for the Transmission of
Hermetic Magic,” in Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and Techniques in the Islamic and
Christian Worlds (Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996).
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Abû Ma‘shar is also one of the sources for the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm. The first treatise of the
Kitāb al-Bulhān is the Kitāb al-Mawālīd, as noted above, but the folios containing the
Children of the Planets are technically not part of this work. Because the Children of the
Planets imagery shows individuals acting out different activities associated with different
nativities, it makes sense that it has been placed next to Abû Ma‘shar’s work on nativities,
but it seems clear it is an illustration from a separate work.
From my experience with the Children of the Planets topic, the valuable and detailed
research of D.S. Rice on the Kitāb al-Bulhān seems to be rather neglected, scarcely
mentioned by the few other scholars who write on this subject. Rice pointed to the sudden
appearance of motifs, similar to the Children of the Planets, in 14th
century Islamic art, like
the Labors of the Months and the Four Seasons (see Image 26).184
He thought the reason
that we do not see the Labors and the Seasons motifs earlier in other Islamic iconography
was because they came from the intersection with Western models. The Kitāb al-Bulhān is
the first, and only, place the Seasons and another motif, the Climes (division of earth into
seven regions), appear in Islamic manuscripts (see Image 27). They do not appear in the two
Ottoman Turkish translations of this work. The Seasons, Rice believed, somehow found its
way into this Arabic work through a northern Italian intermediary. Rice proposed that the
Tacuinum Sanitatis (BNF Nouv. Acq. Lat. 1673, dates: 1380–1390), an illustrated Latin
translation of the Arabic Taqwin al-sihhah by Ibn Butlan (d. 1066) (a work that was never
illustrated in Islamic manuscripts), was the most likely candidate for a source of the Seasons
images in the Kitāb al-Bulhān. In other words, an illustration, that arose in the Latin
translation of an Arabic work, returned to another Arabic work featuring the same theme.
Rice pointed to certain features in the costume of figures in the Climes motif that are
specifically “European” as well; one is a rather Italian looking fellow in the third Clime.
The iconography in the Clime folios of the Kitāb al-Bulhān, as well as depicting the
184
Rice, “The Seasons and the Labors of the Months in Islamic Art.”
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traditional planet figures known to earlier Islamic art, depict the dress and character of
individuals from foreign lands, to acquaint the reader with human geography. Therefore it is
not surprising to find European figures there. The question is whether they borrow the style
from European iconographic models. Though he did not do so explicitly, it seems that Rice
might apply the same argument about the origin of the Seasons to the Children of the Planet
figures in the Kitāb al-Bulhān, especially since they are more or less anomalies in Islamic
manuscripts, much like the two other anomalies to Islamic iconography, the images of the
Climes and the Four Seasons. Part of the reason Rice did not include a detailed account of
the possible Western predecessor for the Children of the Planets, of course, is because there
is none, but maybe he also suspected that they might have a different lineage. Though it is
tempting to follow his argument – that these motifs do not exist elsewhere or before in
Islamic art and must therefore be a product of the intersection with the West – I believe, in
the case of the Children of the Planets, there is possibly another explanation.
We also see in the Kitāb al-Bulhān the first example in manuscripts of a Falnama-I
Jafar. Here we have a specifically Islamic theme represented for the first time in imagery.
In this case, even though we have not seen depictions of this work before, we know it is not
coming from a Western model. The reason it is depicted at just this time I would say is
because of the birth of a new genre in Islamic manuscripts. The ‘Falnama’ were
manuscripts used and designed for the purpose of prognostication. They were exceptional in
the relation they gave between text and image. In the Falnama the images were primary to
the text, the opposite of most illuminated Islamic manuscripts. This was because the images
were meant to be used in divination and as memory devices, i.e., suggestions to implicate a
known story. In the Kitāb al-Bulhān many of the treatises are dedicated to divination,
including the folios of the Children of the Planets, which were used for the most basic form
of divination – discovering one’s governing planet and the related possible future vocations.
The Falnama were used in a form of bibliomancy where an inquirer would ask a question
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and then turn to a random page of the book to find his fortune. More specifically, ‘Falnama’
referred to the tables found at the end of a book (often the Koran) that were used to calculate
what page to turn to in order to find the prognostication. They were in the form of a table or
graph, like the one where we see the Children of the Planets in a 7 X 8 format (see Image
25). The 7 X 8 (7 X 7 + 7) arrangement of the planet figures is described in a section of the
Ghāyat, one that is shared with the Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs.
Chapter four of book three of the Ghāyat tells us how the verses of the Koran can be
divided according to the seven planets, in order to be used for divination.185
In chapter nine
we have a description of the seven spirits that belong to each of the seven planets. These are
in turn related to the Climes.186
This description gives support to the argument that the
Ghāyat could be a text informing the Children of the Planets motif in the Kitāb al-Bulhān,
where we see each of the seven planets attended by seven other planet figures. There are
interesting similarities in the Kitāb al-Bulhān and the curious Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs, a large
portion of which is shared with the Ghāyat and is the source of the seven by seven
arrangement, where “each planet has seven spirits: one on each of its six sides, and one
which unites them all”187
which attend to mankind in daily affairs. Men imparted with one
of these plural entities (e.g., Saturn is accompanied by 72 other Saturns) could “summon up
his spirit in visible form, and that spirit would do his bidding.”188
Kitāb al-Bulhān, as we
have pointed out, is also the only example in any manuscript that contains illustrations of
the planetary ‘climes,’ the geographic areas governed by each planet (described in the Kitāb
al-Isṭamāṭīs).189
It has been suggested by Massumeh Farhad in her Falnama: Book of Omens that the
Kitāb al-Bulhān was something of a prototype of the Falnama, and could even have been
185
Atallah and Kiesel, Picatrix Ghayat Al-Hakim, 2:27. 186
Atallah and Kiesel, Picatrix Ghayat Al-Hakim, 2:105–113. 187
Pingree, “Some of the Sources of the Ghāyat al-hakīm,” 7. 188
Burnett, “The Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs and a Manuscript of Astrological and Astronomical Works of
Barcelona,” 11. See also, “Herman of Carinthia and the Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs: Further Evidence for the
Transmission of Hermetic Magic.” 189
Rice, “The Seasons and the Labors,” 39.
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used for the same purpose.190
The Kitāb al-Bulhān has the same image to text ratio as the
Falnama, where many of the illustrations are self-contained, having little to no text attached
to them. The Children of the Planets folios are examples of these independent images in the
Kitāb al-Bulhān. Thus we can speculate that the Children of the Planets only appear around
the beginning of the 15th
century because the Arabic texts that they illustrate (whether Abû
Ma‘shar or the Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs) were not traditionally illustrated. Only in this period,
starting with a few examples as early as the 13th
century, and blossoming in the 15th
, do we
see an illustration tradition begin in Islamic manuscripts.
III. The Children of the Planets: Survey of European Manuscripts
The Children of the Planets show up in a variety of venues in Western manuscripts. They
appear in 1) calendar cycles, often attached to Christian works, 2) everyday life manuals, 3)
astrological works, and 4) literary works. We find them in the 1491 Heidelberger
Schicksalsbuch, in the 1480 Housebook of the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet, in the
Modena manuscript, De Sphaera, in Christine de Pisan’s Épître d’Othéa, and even in Abû
Ma‘shar’s Flores. Each of these deserves more detail, starting with this last example.
A brief note on Fritz Saxl’s transmission theories surrounding the motif in Europe
should be made before going into detail about the manuscripts. It is necessary to weigh the
current thesis to some extent on Saxl’s research because he was the first to comprehensively
study the Children of the Planets motif, and his work on this subject is still the backbone for
any current scholarship involving this motif. Fritz Saxl theorized two transmission points
for the images of the Children of the Planets in the West. In the first category he put the
Paduan frescos in the Palazzo della Ragione (see Image 31) (originally by Giotto),
classifying these as bearing Eastern features. In the second category he put Christine de
190
Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bagci, Falnama: The Book of Omens (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art,
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2009).
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Pisan illustrations (see Image 42) as the prototypes for the majority of the Children of the
Planet imagery in Western manuscripts.
We have the figures of the Children of the Planets in the Heidelberger
Schicksalsbuch (see Image 48) (Cod. Pal. Germ. 832) identified as such in the University of
Heidelberg Library description of contents, which is actually an excerpt of Abû Ma‘shar’s
Flores. This work was printed in Augsburg in 1488 as the Flores Astrologiae, an extract of
the Introductorium maius, by Erhard Ratdolt and in Venice by Johannes Baptista Sessa, in
the same year (see Image 49). The Introductorium maius (also referred to as Introductorium
in Astronomiam), a treatise on astrology, is the Latin translation of the Arabic Kitab al-
mudkhal al-kabir ila 'ilm ahkam an-nujjum. In the Venetian example we can clearly see a
similarity to the Heidelberg manuscript, where planet figures can be seen in the same order
(see Image 48–49). The Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch also contains the Astrolabium planum
of Pietro d’Abano (ed. Johannes Angelus) and a work on the 36 constellations of the
mathematician and Arabic translator Michael Scotus (1175–1232). It is interesting to find
all of these works next to each other in one codex, as each have been venues for the
iconography of the Children of the Planets separately. Fritz Saxl pointed to the Michael
Scotus illustrations in another manuscript to show an example of a transmission point of
Eastern influences on European texts. Saxl claimed that the images in an early 13th
century
Scotus’ work, Liber Introductorius (also MS Bodl. 266, 15th
c.), bore features of Arabic
iconography of the planet figures. More recently Dieter Blume has called this into question,
saying that the Scotus illustrations are more likely inventions of a creative mind.191
If that is
the case though, we see the connection to the Kitāb al-Bulhān becoming more and more
distant. What examples of the Children of the Planets, if any, ever borrowed from the
imagery of the Kitāb al-Bulhān? If the Scotus illustrations were not the point of contact
between Eastern and Western examples of planet figures, then we are left with no solid
191
Blume, “Michael Scot, Giotto and the Construction of New Images of the Planets.”
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examples of direct transmissions. This makes the Children of the Planets in the Kitāb al-
Bulhān even more of an anomaly, but maybe it also gives us better reasons to question its
provenance and meaning.
Another work, that is also an extract of the Introductorium maius of Abû Ma‘shar, is
the Liber astrologiae (BNF lat. 7344) attributed to Georgius Zothorus Zaparus Fendulus
which also includes ‘planet children.’ It depicts many unique planetary figures (see Image
50). Śnieżyńska-Stolot describes these figures as “Decanal Planets” in her book Astrological
Iconography in the Middle Ages: The Decanal Planets. She explains that the iconography of
the Decans and the planets are very much related. The 36 Decans, which originally
corresponded to the 36 stars and constellations, each govern 10 degrees of the 360-degree
sphere. Each Zodiac sign governs one of 12 places in the celestial sphere. Each of these are
divided into three Decans. One of the seven planets governs each Zodiac (each planet
governs two signs, and the sun and moon govern one sign each) and also each Decan.
Therefore the personifications in depictions of the Decans are the planets, often called the
Faces, just as those depicted in the Children of the Planets motif. The term ‘Face’ refers to
the planet lord of the Decan, that is, the Decan has the face of the planet that governs it.
Each ten-day period is governed by a different planet. Each sign has one planet lord, three
Decans (governed by three planets), and five “Terms” which are five planets. Therefore, a
Decan depiction would often contain three images of the same planet, for example, Jupiter
could be the planet lord of Pisces, the Decan lord of the second Decan, and one of the five
Terms. This is why we can say that the figures in the Liber astrologiae can be considered
prototypical planet children, especially since they accompany the same text commonly
found with the Children of the Planet imagery, Abû Ma‘shar’s Introductorium maius. This
is why Abû Ma‘shar’s Introductorium maius, or a work derived from it, is the likely
candidate for the source of transmission into these early Western examples. Here we are
following in the footsteps of Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl who traced much of the planetary
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imagery through Abû Ma‘shar texts. As mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, the
Magnis coniunctionibus (Kitāb al-qirānāt) and the Kitāb al-Mawālīd are other points of
transmission. The Introductorium maius is one of the most important texts involved in the
transmission of knowledge into Europe starting in the mid-12th
century, as it was one of the
sources of Aristotelianism, and especially introduced Aristotelian thought in the context of
natural philosophy. 192
Perhaps the most well-known example of the Children of the Planets motif is found
in the Housebook of the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet (or Master of the Housebook),
folios 10b–7a. The Housebook (~1480) shows the motif alongside a work on the art of
memory, household recipes, health remedies, mining, minting, metallurgy, pyrotechnics,
and defense of a fortress. The context of the motif here is ‘secular,’ the Housebook as a
whole being a manual for practical everyday knowledge. The Children of the Planets
intended use here seems to be to serve as a reference tool for the qualities related to each
planet, to categorize or predict the behavior of those individuals associated with each planet,
because of their profession or birth. The figures of the planet children in the Housebook
interact with the scenery in a way distinct from other examples of the motif (see Image 1–
5). They are perhaps the most elegant in the form where we see the planet figure as a rider
bearing a flag above the scene. These illustrations are said to have influenced Dürer’s
works. We see a lively interaction in the Housebook illustrations of the figures blending
with the scenery, almost as if a conscious effort was being made to mix the divinities more
fully with human forms and human characteristics. In the Children of Jupiter we can
distinctly see the same figure of Jupiter at the top of the picture is also the king in the throne
at the bottom right corner of the illustration (see Image 2).
192
Richard Lemay, “Abû Ma‘shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century” in The Recovery of
Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy through Arabic Astrology, vol. 38 (Beirut: American University of Beirut
Oriental Series, 1962). Also, Richard Lemay, Abû Ma‘shar Al-Balhi, Kitab al-Madkhal al-kabir ila ‘ilm
ahkam al-nudjum. Liber introductorii maioris ad scientiam judicorum astrorum (Naples: Institutio
Universitario Orientale, 1995–1996), 23 ff.
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There is an additional sequence of planet children in the Housebook, which follow
the more famous examples directly, from folios 18b–25a, that have been strangely
neglected. This series also shows seven illustrations including planetary figures, resembling
the children in the first part. I would also call this series a Children of the Planets series,
much like the accompanying series we see in the Modena manuscript (see Image 6–11). For
some reason I have not seen any commentaries on this second series, but only discovered it
when I looked at the facsimile. This series shows an even more elaborate story of the
Children of the Planets (see Image 5). We recognize some of the same figures from the
previous seven illustrations. These illustrations seem to go into additional details associated
with each planet, and could perhaps even be a sequence depicting the Climes, but this would
have to be supported with more research.
The Housebook is accompanied by German poems, which remind us of the similar
texts that accompany the Children of the Planets, but these are more perhaps more playful:
The Children of Saturn
My children are vicious, dry, and old,
Envious, weary, wretched, cold.
Deep eyes, hard skin, their beards are small,
They’re lame, misshapen, depraved
withal. Traitorous, brooding, greedy, pale,
they often find themselves in jail.
They grub the dirt, dig graves, plow land,
in foul and stinking clothes they stand.
Condemned to die or live in sorrow,
sweet and strain, or trouble borrow.
Always needy, never free,
It’s Saturn’s children there you see.193
(see Image 3)
There are notable similarities in many of the depictions in the Housebook to those in
the Liber astrologiae (see Image 1, 50). We can note this particularly in the figure of Luna,
who in both works sits on a harnessed horse (white), both figures facing left, one leg visible,
193
“Mein kint sein sich pleich, durrr vnd kalt / Grew, treg, poß, neydig, trawrich vnd alt, / Dip, geitig,
gefangen, lame vnd ungestalt, / Tiff augen, ir hawtt ist hartt vnd wenig part / Grasse lebtz, ungeschaffen
gemantt / Wuste thyr sint in wol bekannt. / Das erttrich sie durchgraben gern, / Velt pawens sie auch nicht
empern. / Vnd wie man in noyt vnd arbeit sol leben, / Das ist Satrnus kint gegebenn / Die annders ir natur han,
/ Allein von Saturno sol man das verstan.” For transcription of German text see, Johannes Graf von Waldburg-
Wolfegg, Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch: Betrachtungen vor einer Bilderhandschrift (Munich: Prestel, 1957).
The translation here is by Marianne Hansen, from Timothy B. Husband, The Medieval Housebook and the Art
of Illustration (New York: Frick, 1999). See, Blazekovic, “Variations on the Theme of the Planet’s Children.”
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with long hair, bare foreheads, and round faces. The image of the lobster is above the
shoulder (See image 1, 50). These kinds of similarities point to the common origin shared
by many of the Children of the Planets series.
The earliest example of the Children of the Planets in Western manuscripts are those
found in Christine de Pisan’s 1406 Épître d’Othéa (BNF, MS. Fr. 606) (see Image 42). Here
the motif is distinctly related to the theme in the work, of the struggle to master one’s own
fortune, where it is introduced as essential knowledge for a questing knight. The text that
introduces the Children of the Planet imagery cites ‘Geber’ (Jābir ibn Hayyān) as a source.
It describes the “conditions” and qualities of the planets that men and women should or
should not strive to emulate.194
A knight should be like Jupiter (Christlike), noble and
humane, but a lady should avoid being like Venus, amorous and idle. The days of the week
are also associated with each, “Saturday is named after Saturn, and the metal lead is given
thereto, and it is a planet of slow condition, heavy and wise.”195
The layout of the motif in
Pisan’s work are the key feature that has been highlighted by scholars, like Saxl, where we
see the central planet deity at the top of each illustration in a nimbus, with the smaller
children beneath, in a row. The combination of this layout with the planet children forms
was seen as an innovation of Christine de Pisan, who was said to have overseen the original
production of the illuminations of her works.196
The layout itself comes from the
iconography of the Last Judgement and Descent of the Holy Ghost (Cod. Bamberg, MS.
Lat. 5) prototypes, as explained by Saxl and Panofsky.197
The same layout was also adapted
for depictions of the Liberal Arts, where Minerva is seen above the seven arts, as in a
manuscript of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus (On Famous Women) (BNF, ca.1400). This
194
Christine de Pisan, The epistle of Othea to Hector or, The boke of knyghthode (London: J.B. Nichols &
Sons, 1904), 17–24. A modern English edition: Jane Chance, Christine De Pizan’s Letter of Othea to Hector:
Translated With Introduction, Notes, and Interpretative Essay (Albany: The Focus Library of Medieval
Women, SUNY Press, 1989). 195
Pisan, Othea, 19. 196
Anne-Marie Barbier, “Le cycle iconographique perdu de l’Epistre Othea de Christine de Pizan,” Cahiers de
recherches médiévales 16 (2008): 279–299. 197
See, Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art,” 246; Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl,
Saturn and Melancholy, 206.
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is interesting because we know Pisan’s other work, Livre de la Cite des dames (The Book of
the City of Ladies), was seen as a reaction to this work by Boccaccio. The format is found
as well, for example in the German Losbuch (Vienna, ser. nov. 2652, 14th
c.), which shows
pagan philosophers related to the seven planets: “In this [work] is the notion that a man has
a ruling planet, and that if he is true to it, he will live out a singular fortune. Individual fate
is only for those who live according to their true nature.”198
The Losbuch (Lot Book) is one
example from the genre of “oracle books” that we see many examples of in the 15th
century,
which were used for divinatory purposes. I would speculate that we even perhaps have the
same or a very similar layout in the Keir Collection illumination of Abu Mashar’s Kitāb al-
Mawālīd, or even in the Kitāb al-Bulhān illustrations of that work (see Images 36-42). Why
this shared layout it present between these geographically distant examples is unclear.
Though not in a manuscript, we should mention here the Children of the Planet
imagery in the frescos in the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, attributed to Giotto (1266–
1337), and those in the Schifanoia frescos (ca. 1470). These are said to derive, through the
Astrolabium planum of Pietro d’Abano (1257–1316), from Abû Ma‘shar’s descriptions of
the planets, in the text mentioned earlier that is commonly found along side the Children of
the Planets in Western examples, the Liber Astrologiae.199
Saxl pointed to the arrangement
of these Children of the Planet figures in a graph layout, which we know is a feature shared
by the Arabic and Ottoman examples that we have (see Image 25, 31).200
Otherwise the
details of the planet children in the frescos do not exhibit the traditional features found in
Islamic art. There is evidence that these depictions could be related to the paranatellonta
(the personifications of the star groups and planets that rise together with the Sun or angles
in a horoscope), where some of the images are similar to the images in the Vaticanus
198
Warren Kenton, Astrology: The Celestial Mirror (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 108. 199
See, Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art,” 245. 200
Fritz Saxl, La Fede Negli Astri: dall’ antichita al Rinascimento (Torino: Boringhieri, 1985).
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Reginensis 1283, the ‘Spanish Picatrix.’201
If this is the case it does beg the question of
whether other Children of the Planets imagery also exhibits shared aspects with
paranatellonta imagery. We also see the Children of the Planets in the Schifanoia frescos,
for example, in the Triumph of Venus, that are comparable to the images of Venus in the
Krakow Picatrix (see Image 15, 30).
The illustrations by Cristoforo de Perdis of the 15th
century (1450–1470) Modena
manuscript, De Sphaera (Biblioteca Estense, MS Lat. 209), accompany a text by Francesco
Filelfo (1398–1481), the Italian Renaissance humanist. This work is an untitled manuscript
that 20th
century scholars appended the name ‘De Sphaera’ to. The elegant and complex
illustrations of the Modena manuscript feature the Children of the Planets both beneath the
central figure of each planet, as well as on a facing page, even in a graph form for the
children of Mercury (see Image 11). This can be compared to the accompanying second
series of planet figures in the Housebook (see Image 5). These depictions thus combine both
the formatting of the Pisan images, and the tabular arrangement seen in the Palazzo della
Ragione Children of the Planets.202
Another example that has another series of seven images accompanying a second
Children of the Planets theme is the Splenor Solis (Harley MS. 3469, 16th
c., and Berlin
Kupferstichkabinett Cod. 78 D 3, d. 1531). In the Splenor Solis, a German alchemical
manuscript attributed to the legendary Salomon Trismosin (perhaps mentor of Paracelsus)
which is based largely on the alchemical manuscript Aurora Consurgens (d. 1410), through
a German translation dating to the 1520s (Cod. germ. qu. 848), we see an interesting
combination of variations of the motif. The manuscripts of the Splendor Solis contain 22
illustrated folios. The seven Children of the Planet images each follow the same layout: the
central figure in each is an alchemical elixir, which contains personifications of the elixir in
201
On the paranatellonta see, Marco Bertozzi, La tirrania degli astri: gli affreschi astrologici di Palazzo
Schifanoia (Livorno: Sillabe, 1999), 42–44. For the Spanish manuscript see, Alfonso d’Agostino, Astromagia
(MS Reg. Lat. 1283 a) de Alfonso X el Sabio (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1992). 202
Daniele Bini, Astrologia: arte e cultura in età rinascimentale (Modena: Biblioteca Estense, 1997).
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a flask, the planet is shown at the top in a chariot, and the children are featured beneath and
beside the flask. Another related seven folios show some familiar planetary figures, for
example we can see Mars beheading a king in the sixth illumination (see Image 32). These
details in the second series of illustrations that commonly accompany the Children of the
Planets motif, and the additional planet children figures in them is something that needs
further investigation. Jörg Völlinagel203
recently pointed to the relationship between many
of the images in the Splendor Solis and those Children of the Planet images by Jörg Breu the
Elder (1510 Series) (see Image 46), even speculating that Jörg Breu the Elder could be the
illuminator of the Splendor Solis planet children.
We can look at the second part of the Astrolabium planum edited by Johannes
Angelus (John Engles), Pietro d’Abano’s work (based on Abû Ma‘shar’s Introductorium
maius) for an example of the way a text that described the planet children would understand
its own sources. In an introduction by William Lilly in the English edition (1655), Lilly
gives the genealogy of sources to be the Egyptians, Ibn Ezra, and the ‘Doctrine of the
Spheres.’ Lilly’s introduction tells us that the work is specifically useful for people who
want to predict the character of their children through understanding the Nativity, i.e., the
degree of the Ascendant in relation to the Decan or Face of the sign. The key is to place the
child in accord with “his proper Genius” (Intro. Astrolabium planum, Lilly). He admits that
there are manifold other uses, but does not have time to go into them.
There is an interesting development in a Central European example of a planet
series. In one manuscript of Konrad Kyeser’s Bellifortis (early 15th
century, MTAK Cod.
Lat. K 465) we find the blending of the planet figures with contemporary personalities. The
illustrations show the planets as human figures on horseback with flags (much like the
Housebook figures), and in the case of the Sun we find a portrait of King Sigismund of
203
Jörg Völlnagel, “Harley MS. 3469: Splendor Solis or Splendor of the Sun – A German Alchemical
Manuscript,” Electronic British Library Journal (2011): 7. Accessed on June 2, 2012,
htt://www.bl.uk/eblj/2011articles/pdf/ebljarticle82011.pdf.
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Hungary, and Holy Roman Emperor. This was due to an innovation by the artist, and not to
the author of the manuscript, as Benedek Láng points out, “Fortunately, Kyeser had died
before he could have faced the trauma that the illuminator of this fragment depicted his
greatest enemy, the emperor Sigismund.”204
This is the only version of the Bellifortis that
depicts Sigismund, who had deposed his brother Wenceslas IV, whose court Kyeser
belonged to. This manuscript was probably produced for Sigismund, and eventually
belonged to the Corvinus Library. This would indicate a point at which the motif combines
the astrological formula, and depiction of the planet deity, with an image of an actual king,
in an attempt to create a contemporary appeal to its viewer and to place the astrological
mechanism into a modern sphere.
IV. Kraków Picatrix
Ewa Śnieżyńska-Stolot in her book Picatrix Latinus,205
discusses the only illustrated Latin
version of the Picatrix, the Kraków Picatrix (ca. 1458, 1459) (BJ 793). This work was
discussed as well by Benedek Láng in 2008 in his work, Unlocked Books.206
Láng pointed
to the East-Central European origin of the manuscript in the context of the idea of there
being a ‘magic school’ in Cracow, and to see how the environment that produced this text
dealt with astrology as a field of study. Láng made the interesting suggestion that perhaps
only the first two books were illustrated because of the type of magic being described there,
as opposed to the ‘darker’ magic of the latter two books. The division between types of
magic, talismanic, demonic, in the Speculum would support this possibility. But it does not
seem that this was the case, but rather the death of the scribe Piotr Gaszowiec (d. 1474), also
204
Benedek Láng, Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central
Europe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2008), 77, fn. 84. 205
Ewa Śnieżyńska-Stolot, “Summary,” in Picatrix Latinus: Ikonografia planet i planet dekanicznych w
rękopisie Krakowskim [The iconography of the planets and the decanal planets in the Kraków manuscript],
89–107 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego, 2009). 206
Benedek Láng, Unlocked Books, 103.
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the author of one of the accompanying texts in the codex.207
The illustrations begin in full
color but trail off to outlines. The text stops, while the images go on to depict the rest of the
Decans. Śnieżyńska-Stolot writes that the illuminator was tracing other images. The text
that the Kraków Picatrix was tracing from would be a non-extant Picatrix Latinus. This
‘ghost text’ would have been originally copied and illustrated sometime in the late 14th
or
early 15th
century in the court of Prague, and was probably in turn derived from an
Alfonsine manuscript.208
The images of the planets in the Picatrix show the planets sitting
atop different animals. Similar imagery is seen in a few Arabic manuscripts (BNF MS arabe
2775 and MS Biblioteca Escorial, 14th
c. ‘Al-Magrithi Kitab Thakhirat al-Iskandar’
[Treasure of Alexander]209
) (see Image 24), for example, in an undated Cairo manuscript of
the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (see Image 23).210
The Kraków Picatrix, only just discovered in Saxl’s
time, put a damper on some of Saxl’s theories on the transmission of the planetary
iconography, because he believed the illustrations to be spontaneous creations of an
individual illuminator and not related in any way to Oriental models, as he had hoped.
Recent research on the manuscript, by Benedek Láng and Ewa Śnieżyńska-Stolot, can now
tell us a little more about its images.211
The Vaticanus Reginensis 1283,212
a 13th
century fragment of the Spanish version of
the Picatrix, composed in the court of Alfonso X, interestingly accompanies text by Abû
Ma‘shar’s Introductorium maius describing the paranatellonta.213
This illuminated
manuscript was discovered by Aby Warburg in 1911 in the Vatican Library. We know from
the original preface to the Picatrix that the work was translated into Spanish first, and then
Latin, the Latin coming from the Spanish translation and not the Arabic, as noted by David
207
Śnieżyńska-Stolot, “Summary,” in Picatrix Latinus, 90. 208
Śnieżyńska-Stolot, “Summary,” in Picatrix Latinus, 89. 209
Anna Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb, Livro do Tesouro De Alexandre: Um estudo de hermetica arabe na ofincina
da historia da ciencia (Petropolis: Editora Vozes) 1999. 210
Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, ed. M. Nasar, Cairo [n.d.], 60. See, David Pingree, “Indian Planetary Images and the
Tradition of Astral Magic,” The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52 (1989): 8, fn. 40. 211
Láng, Unlocked Books, see 79–80, 98. 212
See the related text, the Alfonsine Lapidarium II (Escorial h. I. 15), Śnieżyńska-Stolot, Astrological
Iconography in the Middle Ages, 13. 213
See, Bertozzi, La tirrania degli astri, 42–44; Pingree, “Between the Ghaya and the Picatrix,” 27–57.
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Pingree.214
It was written originally in Spain, possibly by an anonymous Sabian author from
Harran.215
Yehuda ben Moshe is thought to have translated the Arabic text into the
vernacular around 1243–1250.216
It was then translated into Latin in 1256. The dissertation
by Raquel Diez217
notes that this work is not a direct translation of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, but
an expanded work that elaborates on the passages of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm that it quotes. The
name ‘Picatriz’ is given in this manuscript, which shows that this name has come from the
Spanish translation. More recent speculation on the name ‘Picatrix’ might point to its origin
in the Spanish noun picador.218
Its rather refined style of illuminations, showing, for
example, Luna riding on a rabbit (a customary depiction in Indian art) encased in a circle or
sphere (see Image 20). After a treatise on the Mansions of the Moon and the Zodiacal signs
there are ten folios describing the planets, though only descriptions of Mars, Venus, and
Mercury are included in the fragment. These illuminations of Mars illustrate passages 2.10
and 3.7 of the Picatrix. We see the seventh spirit of Mars depicted as an angel in the central
circle of a circular diagram, surrounded by six other figures (see Image 19). The
corresponding passage is 3.7, where (as in 3.9 where each planet is described as having six
spirits and an additional seventh that governs them) seven names of the spirits of Mars are
given. There are images of Mercury, but the text is missing for them (fols. 31r-36v).
Interestingly, the illustration seems to draw equally on the passage from 2.10, where four
forms of Mars are described according to different authorities (Beylus, Hermes, Picatriz,
and ‘other sages’), using the details of the features for the figures in the illustration:
[A nude man standing with a] virgin mistress, & this is the figure (statue?) of Venus, and is
lifted up, & her hair fastened back; & Mars his right hand placed on the neck of Venus &
the left hand on the breasts; Gazing & looking at her face. So says this wise one [Hermes] in
his book about this and in this way many great works are accounted. We speak about this in
214
Pingree, “Between the Ghaya and the Picatrix,” 27. 215
Śnieżyńska-Stolot, Picatrix Latinus, 89. 216
d’Agostino, Astromagia, 21–22, 26, 3, fn. 56. 217
Diez, “Alfonso X el sabio: Picatrix,” 47. 218
J. Thomann proposes this in a footnote, but actually emphasizes a different theory involving a translation of
the name ‘Maslama’ in his article, but I prefer the ‘picador’ theory. J. Thomann, “The Name Picatrix:
Transcription or Translation?” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 289–296, 296, fn.
81. Also, Śnieżyńska-Stolot, Astrological Iconography in the Middle Ages, 13.
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our own ‘el libro de las ymagenes.’219
The shape of Mars in other books is the figure of a
knight on a lion, & has in his right hand a sword & in the left a man's head, taking it by the
hair, and his garments are new. The figure of Mars’s in the second saying of Picatriz is a
figure of a knight on lion, and in his hand a long lance. The second figure of Mars of the
wise Picatriz is this: [symbol of Mars]” (fol. 27r).220
This description could correspond to the first image of Mars, if for some reason the
illustrator interpreted ‘figura’ to mean statue (it can have this meaning), for here we see
Mars holding a small statue of a woman, looking into its face. The following figure
corresponds as well. The images are, counterclockwise: a naked man holding a statue (of
Venus?) in his right hand, the left across her chest, a man on a lion holding a sword in his
right hand, a warrior on a lion with a lance, a warrior holding a head and sword, a man-half-
dog holding a sword and human head, a crowned man standing holding a sword, and in the
middle an angelic figure with wings (fol. 27). Venus is also described here in the description
of Mars, where Mars holds her by the neck and looks at her. This is the passage that is
illustrated in the Kraków Picatrix. Three of the Mars figures are strikingly similar to those
in the wheel of Mars illustration of the Vaticanus Reginensis manuscript. We can see many
similar features to those illustrations of the planets in the Kraków Picatrix (see Images 12–
18). Of course, the Kraków Picatrix dates to nearly two centuries later, so in this case we
have an immense chronological gap, not to mention language difference, between the two
manuscripts. Whether we can place these images in the same category of classification of
planet iconography as those of the Kraków Picatrix, as laid out and appended to by
219
This reference, which is not in the Latin probably refers back to the beginning of 2.10, where there the
figures of the planets are attributed to the “Libro spirituum et ymaginum quem transtulit sapiens Picatrix” (line
10). This could also be a reference to De imaginibus by Thābit ibn Qurra (al-Ḥarrānī, 826–901), which is a
primary source for the Picatrix. 220
My translation from Pingree’s transcript, the ellipses are reconstructed from the Latin. Pingree, “Between
the Ghaya and the Picatrix”: “…manceba virgen, & es esta la figura de Venus; et esta levantada en pie, & sus
cabellos fechos crinechados atras; & Mars ponendo su mano diestra en su pescuego de Venus & la mano
siniestra en lo[s] pechos della; & el catando & mirando en su cara. & dize esto sabio que esta y. desta manera a
grandes fechos et muchos segunt el conto en su libro. & nos [&] te fablamos desta y. en el nuestro libro de las
ymagenes. La forma de Mars en otros libros es figura de omne cauallero sobre un leon, & tiene en su mano
diestra una espada & en la siniestra cabepa de omne, teniendo la por los cabellos; et sus uestidos nueuos. La
forma de Mars segund el dicho de Picatriz es figura de omne cavallero sobre un leon, et en su mano azcona
luenga.... La figura de Mars segund el sabio Picatriz es esta:…” See, Greer and Warnock, Picatrix, 2.10, 103.
The English from the Latin: “The image of Mars according to the opinion of Hermes is the form of a nude man
standing erect on his feet and before him on the right is a beautiful maiden standing on her feet, which is the
form of Venus; and her hair is fastened in the back; and Mars is placing his right hand on her neck and his left
hand is stretched out above her breast, and he is facing her and gazing upon her.”
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Śnieżyńska-Stolot, or whether they should be in their own category is hard to say, but it is
tempting because of their similarity to group them together.
The comparison of manuscripts of the Children of the Planets can tell us a great deal
about their development. The contexts in which they are found, as we can see evidenced
here in this chapter, are important to us because they provide us with the texts that used the
motif and show us how image and text might have been understood by their audience. As
we can see by the number of examples, the Children of the Planets were an extremely
popular theme in 15th
century manuscripts, showing their relevance to the early modern
individual. From Padua, to Baghdad, to Modena, to Cracow they communicated a distinct
astrological idea through a new motif. The relevance of the Children of the Planets is tied to
discussions in scientific, religious, and magical categories. How this idea was to be put into
print, thus finding its even wider distribution, we will see in the next chapter.
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Chapter 3
‘Housebooks’ in the Transition from Manuscript to Print in 15th
Century Europe
To place our discussion in a broader conceptual framework we can look at some of the
intellectual trends in the 15th
century. Turning again to one of the humanists of this time
period, Marsilio Ficino, might give us insight into some of the reasons we find these
interactions of religious, astrological, medicinal, and everyday life, and whose translations
were widely printed. As we have discussed in our first chapter, we find in his writings the
first use of the term prisca theologia. The idea of a ‘natural religion,’ the idea that the divine
is common to all, can be seen in many literatures during this time.221
This is the way of
thinking that was informing the genres of early printing that we are discussing here. There
were eight printed editions of Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum before 1500.
These along with Ficino’s translations of Plato’s works, printed first in 1484, contributed to
the revival of the ancient philosophies and religion that were so popular in the Renaissance.
Ficino himself tried to harmonize Christian theology with Platonic philosophy and
Ptolemaic astrology. His De vita libri tres (Three Books on Life), first printed in 1489, can
be seen as a complex example in the genre of ‘housebooks’ that we will try to define in this
chapter, i.e., works dedicated to the ‘good’ way of living, offering practical approaches
toward acquiring knowledge of the world through right action in everyday life. Ficino’s
work provides guidelines for how to approach subjects in philosophy, theology, and health,
those topics that his readers would find useful and beneficial in their daily lives. De vita
then is a complex and philosophical work for a sophisticated intellectual audience, which
we should consider for certain parallels in the typical block-book and early print, and which
have common features for a wider readership. Reverse order or delete
In order to better understand the transition from manuscript to print, let us look
closely for a moment at one specific manuscript of the Picatrix, which I think is the ideal
221
Tambiah, Magic, Science, and Religion, 5.
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example of what I mean by ‘housebook.’ The Canonicianus Latinus 500, in the Bodleian
Library, Oxford, is what I would call an authentic spell book. The manuscript was copied in
Italy in 1580 (bound before 1710), and is a miscellany including an illustrated herbal, a
treatise on medicines, another on common diseases, a printed work by Trithemius entitled
‘Generalis Clavis Secretorum,’ and books 3 and 4 of the Picatrix. This vellum covered
book, with hand-stamped floral patterns on the inside cover, once belonged to (according
the first folio) the polymath Guiseppe Columbani (1676–1736), and also the Jesuit Matteo
Luigi Canonici (1727–1805). The Canonicianus Latinus 500 is a great example of how
manuscript and print were blended together to create a book that could be used on a daily
basis. Bound directly in the middle of the Picatrix folios (see Image 52), we find a work by
Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), the German Abbott and contemporary of Agrippa and
Paracelsus. It is an astrological work, and describes the characteristic of the seven planets,
which is probably why it was bound next the Picatrix. It appears to be a ‘key’ to the third
book of Steganographia, so may be apparently some sort of a cipher for underlying
content,222
but it is an unknown one, not mentioned among his genuine or spurious works.223
Trithemius is said to have noted that the cryptographic part of his works are a “secular
consequent of the ability of a soul specially empowered by God to reach, by magical means,
from earth to Heaven.”224
The first treatise in the work shows lively illustrations of different
herbs, some of them with human faces (see Image 53). What occurred to me when
examining this manuscript is that the context that we find different works in is in fact
important. Here we can see how this book as a whole was used for practical purposes, the
herbal to make medicines and the Picatrix to cast spells, with the help of the planets. This
222
Thomas Ernst, “Schwarzweisse Magie: Der Schlussel zum dritten Buch der Steganographia des
Trithemius,” Daphnis: Zeitschrift für Mittlere Deutsche Literatur 25 (1996): 1–205. Noel L. Brann, Trithemius
and Magical Theology: A Chapter in the controversy over the occult studies in Early Modern Europe (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1999). 223
Pingree, Picatrix: The Latin Version, xxii-xxiii. 224
Noel L. Brann, “Trithemius, Johannes,” in Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J.
Hanegraff (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 1135–1139.
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shows us how an early modern reader of the Picatrix would have viewed the work, as a
practical tool.
I. Context of Block-Books and Woodblock Prints
Prior to movable type there was an earlier form of print in Europe, the block-book, seen as
early as 1420, where prints were made from a carved wood block, imprinting full sheets of
paper with an image in ink. One of the reasons the block-book printing technique came into
use was because of the greater availability of paper. By 1450 more advanced techniques
superseded these methods, where a large number of books could be produced easily with the
printing press. The manuscript was not immediately replaced by the invention of print, but
instead this was a gradual change, where manuscripts and early prints were often found side
by side in the same library, printed pages bound next to handwritten ones. Most interesting
about this process are the subjects that were represented by early printed works and how
they compare to those of the manuscripts in this transitional period. Among the most
popular subjects of early printed works were Biblical meditations (e.g. Canticum
canticorum, Biblia pauperum, Book of Hours, etc.), but second to these were practical
subjects like calendar cycles, recipes, health remedies, techniques for metalworking,
medicinal works, arts of memory, and Ars moriendi. Both of these two categories were
found in “housebooks” of the time, i.e., books that were used as reference tools in early
modern households, sometimes designed specifically for everyday use.225
Housebooks were
first seen as manuscripts, and were individual to the household that owned them, but
interestingly it is the very subjects of housebooks that we find in many early prints that were
adapted for use by a wider audience. The ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ topics in these books
225
William Pidduck, “Publisher’s Note” in Medieval and Early Modern Women Part 2: Household books,
Correspondence, and Manuscripts Owned by Women, from the British Library, London – A listing and guide
to the microfilm collection, Southampton: Ashford Press, 2004.
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were found stitched together in one work.226
In this chapter I will look at a more subtle
difference in content between the biblical and astrological elements found in many early
prints to examine how they were perceived by their readers. The Children of the Planets
were in this context a calendar cycle for the days of the week but also a useful tool to
understand one’s horoscope. They fit into a broad picture of the universe, the understanding
of the cosmos, and of God’s creations of the celestial spheres.
Print brought many literatures into the private realm, and therefore it is one of the
main factors in making the privatization of religion possible. An examination of early
printed literatures that lie on the border between the secular and religious spheres will tell us
how these elements were understood by the individual of the early modern period. We can
focus on block-books and woodcut prints to begin with and then look at close relationships
between the images in manuscripts and prints of the same work, for example in the case of
the Heidelberger bilderkatechismus (Cod. Pal. germ. 438) and the prints of Erhard Ratdolt,
the Augsburg printer. Our examples of the Children of the Planets motif move from
manuscript to print quickly. The Housebook manuscript is also an interesting case, bridging
the gap between manuscript and print, as there was probably a printed version made of it
that has not survived.227
It contains only practical and astrological subjects. We see in many
block-book subjects addressing astrology, health, and prayer, which will open this chapter
as well to a discussion on magic, religion, and science. We see these three categories blend
effortlessly in many examples of block-books.228
226
For a comparison of different uses of the term, see Jose Casanova, “Secularization, Enlightenment, and
Modern Religion,” in Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 13.
These definitions of secularization have been discussed: 1) in a differentiation between two spheres, religious
and secular, and 2) in a movement toward the private sphere, and 3) in a decline of religion. Casanova writes,
that “these historically sedimented semantic moments of the term ‘secularization’ only make sense if we
accept the fact that, ‘once upon a time,’ much of reality in medieval Europe was actually structured through a
system of classification which divided ‘this world’ into two heterogeneous realms of spheres, ‘the religious’
and the ‘secular.’” 227
Blazekovic, “Variations on the Theme of the Planet’s Children,” 244. 228
For a discussion of these terms see Stanley Tambiah, “Magic, Science, and religion in Western Thought:
Anthropology’s Intellectual Legacy” in Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–31.
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Printing made religious subjects (through texts) more available to a larger audience,
and eventually it also made it more private. For these reasons we can say that print had an
early part to play as a secularizing factor, that is, if we define the term ‘secular’ versus
‘ecclesiastic,’ then we can understand its usage in terms of the 15th
century. In this sense we
can speak of the secular as part of the ‘profane’ realm. I suggest that the term secular is
attached to ‘everyday life’ and I will use it in this chapter as analogous to the realm of
everyday life. Charles Taylor writes about the “enchanted world” (in terms of Weberian
‘disenchantment’) of the ancien régime model, where state and church are interwoven. He
says
In an enchanted world there is a strong contrast between the sacred and the profane. By the
sacred, I mean certain places (such as churches), certain agents (such as priests), certain
times (such as high feasts), and certain actions (such as saying the Mass) in which the divine
or the holy is present. In comparison to these, other places, people, times, and actions may
count as profane.229
This is recognizable even in Augustinian theology, where the earthly city continually
reflects upon another city, a city of god. In these terms we can very easily use the term
‘secular’ for we are talking about a society in the 15th
century that functions not only in
“higher time” but in “secular time” as well. This harkens back to the etymology of the term
‘secular’ from Latin saeculum, that is, secular defined as “age, century, or world.”230
Even
though Jose Casanova would say that the “differentiation of time and space into two
different realities, a sacred and a profane one, became truly meaningless long ago,”231
for
the time period we are discussing the distinguishing of two realms described by Taylor here
is necessary and indicative.
The block-book was usually highly illustrated, imitating illuminated manuscripts.
Their images were combined with text that was either handwritten or also printed with the
same method. Books made with this early printing technique were slightly more accessible
to a wider audience and more affordable, say, than those commissioned manuscripts that
229
Charles Taylor, “Religious Mobilizations,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 283. 230
Casanova, Public Religions, 12. 231
Casanova, Public Religions, 13.
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were done completely by hand. Still, generally we are looking at an aristocratic or wealthy
urban class consumer for these types of works, those few who were literate, and not the
common man, and this is so even of the early movable type works. Nonetheless, these kinds
of printing methods began to make texts more available to a wider readership, and some
block-books, like the Biblia pauperum (Pauper’s Bible) or the Planetenbuch (Planet Book),
would have been used as teaching tools, their large illustrated narratives being accessible
even to those non-readers through a copy owned by a parish church. Biblia pauperum were
vernacular collections of illustrated biblical commentaries, the central text comparing the
correspondences between the Old and New testaments. The illustrations in these works
dominated the page, with minimal text accompanying large images, which distinguished
them from most manuscripts and perhaps made them popular as printed works. The first
movable type Biblia pauperum is the 1462 print done by Albrecht Pfister in Bamberg in
German. The earliest Planetenbuch comes even before this, ca. 1455 (Heidelberg,
Universitatsbibliothek, Cod. Pal. Germ. 438). Here, even a member of the lower classes
could afford to collect single folios that were produced from woodblock impressions, one-
page versions of similar texts:
In addition to book illustration, woodcuts were also produced in the 15th century as single-
leaf devotional prints. Such prints were collected by laypeople as mementos of pilgrimage
and used in private prayer; they functioned to sustain an encounter between the worshipper
and the figure depicted. Like book illustration, which structured the text for the reader, the
visual form of the devotional print was related to its practical function for the worshipper.232
These single leaf illustrated prints were popular in private homes and were even used as a
sort of talisman to protect the home, for example “St. Christopher bearing the Infant Jesus,
who would, for a day protect from death anyone who caught his gaze.”233
Block-books, much like illuminated manuscripts, were somewhat of a commodity
for their owners. Owning a block-book would be seen as a status symbol in the same way
that the aristocracy would see owning a manuscript. In her article, “Profane Illuminations,
232
Cynthia A. Hall, “Before the Apocalypse: German Prints and Illustrated Books, 1450–1500,” Harvard
University Art Museums Bulletin, 4, no. 2 (1996), 8–29. 233
Blazekovic, “Variations on the Theme of the Planet’s Children,” 243.
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Secular Illusions: Manuscripts in Late Medieval Courtly Society,” Brigitte Buettner
describes this use of manuscripts as status symbols by the aristocratic readership that had
them commissioned.234
She discusses how illuminated manuscripts on profane subjects
“contributed to the development of a secular typology that familiarized the aristocracy with
its putative past, a secular opposed to a biblical ancestry.”235
The aristocratic libraries of the
13th
through 15th
centuries reflect interest in more ‘historical’ subjects, as well as ‘literary,’
including vernacular prose and poetry, in comparison to the clerical libraries of the same
time. The aristocratic interest in secular subjects was oriented toward a taste for the past;
history, science, and literature were pursued with a greater interest in the libraries of the
aristocracy. Buettner suggests that the secular images of the illuminated manuscripts
commissioned by aristocracy “helped to create what would become, during the
Renaissance, a ”‘cult of the past,’ that is, a cult of the pagan past.”236
In other words, a
notable difference between the libraries of the aristocracy and those of the church would be
in the amount of secular or profane subjects they owned. The aristocratic libraries reflected
interest in texts that included narratives, fables, and heroic tales, and preferred texts (had a
larger number in comparison to the clerical libraries) that fell outside of the solely
theological topics. This tendency created in the production of illuminated manuscripts was
handed down to the block-book printing tradition. This could explain the sometimes purely
non-ecclesiastic content of some block-books and manuscripts from this time period.
A common form of block-book was the Planetenbuch, where we find our images of
the Children of the Planets in many examples, as mentioned in the introduction, which we
will list again here: ca. 1455 Planetenbuch (Heidelberg, Universitatsbibliothek, Cod. Pal.
Germ. 438, 149r–150v); 1460 Baccio Baldini (1436–1487) engravings; 1460 London
Block-Book in the British Library (I A 27); 1460 Basel Block-Book, Öffentliche Bibliothek
234
Brigitte Buettner, “Profane Illuminations, Secular Illusions: Manuscripts in Late Medieval Courtly
Society,” The Art Bulletin, 74, no. 1 (1992): 75–90. 235
Buettner, “Profane Illuminations,” 82. 236
Buettner, “Profane Illuminations,” 82.
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(A N V 37a); 1470 Wirkungen der Planeten Block-Book (Granger Collection); 1470 Berlin
Block-Book, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen; Copenhagen Block-Book, Statens
Museum for Kunst (Det kongelige Bibliotek); Vienna Block-Book (Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Ink.2.d.4); 1510 Jörg Breu the Elder (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin,
Staatliche Museen); 15th
c. Schwabach Block-Book (Kirchen-Kapetelsbibliotek).237
II. The Calendar in Prints
The calendar, the days of the week, the labors of the months, and the zodiac were other
secular themes in block-book prints. The popularity of these subjects was due to their
usefulness on a daily level, where a book containing these motifs could be used as a
reference guide from day to day, as meditations or teaching tools, where days of the week
were associated and depicted with corresponding planets and qualities associated with them.
The Labors of the Months commonly accompanies the Children of the Planets, portraying
those activities that were performed during different times of the year, wheat harvest, grape
harvest, planting, etc., related to each month. The nativities of individuals could be
understood in relation to the zodiac and planets they were governed by, which would help
predict future character development and ways of life.
Agnes Dukkon discusses the role in cultural history of Hungarian calendars in early
prints in her work Régi Magyarországi Kalendáriumok Európai Háttérben (Old Hungarian
calendars in a European background). She looks at the “domestic appearance and
blossoming of the genre of calendars”238
in the broad history of science, literature, art, and
folklore, beginning with the late 16th
century and ending with examples from the mid 18th
century. Using mainly the series of bibliographies Régi Magyarországi Nyomtatványok
(RMNy, ‘Early Hungarian Prints’) and Régi Magyar Könyvtár (RMK, ‘Old Hungarian
237
For a list of the Children of the Planets in Block-Books, see: Sabine Mertens, Elke Purpus, and Cornelia
Schneider, Blockbücher des Mittelalters: Bilderfolgen als Lektüre (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1991), 410. 238
Agnes Dukkon, Régi Magyarországi Kalendáriumok Európai Háttérben [Old Hungarian calendars in a
European background] (Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, 2003), 213.
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Library’), Dukkon shows how astrological subjects were highlighted and handled in popular
prints:
The Scientific attitude of Humanism, the increased value of the role and the destiny of man,
results in the characteristic blurred contours and intermingling of the ancient pagan culture
and Christian world view in the early modern age calendars. Even the spirit of the
Reformation is felt: in many 16th century calendars one observes a sense of uncertainty,
hidden remorse, a compulsion to offer excuses concerning astrology. This explains the fact
that calendar makers or publishers often add short prayers or references to the Divine
Providence to the text of prognostica. The choice, or the question of ‘either-or’ seems
particularly obvious for Martin Luther and Calvin who refuse to interrogate the stars when it
comes to human destiny.239
Dukkon points to the need for further studies “through complimentary comparitive
investigation of the European background, and Polish, German, English, and French
calendars”240
and on the genre of Central European (Hungarian) printing to compare to
those publications focusing on printing in other centers of Europe. She also looks closely at
the contexts of early Hungarian prints, and at their “assessment of the content, and
traditional components – symbols, astronomy, elements of everyday life, e.g., healing
economic advice, superstitions, beliefs, and means of entertainment, teaching, chronicles,
anecdotes, and rhymes” where “Calendars – especially in Central Europe – functioned much
as newspapers for a long period.”241
The calendar, and the motifs that would have
accompanied it, functioned as a way of receiving daily information, like a newspaper
updating readers on current affairs, much like today where horoscopes are still found in
daily and weekly papers. The calendrical motifs made knowledge available in an appealing
and accessible format, and offered a novel way of looking at astrology and the passing year.
239
Agnes Dukkon, Régi Magyarországi Kalendáriumok, 216. 240
Agnes Dukkon, Régi Magyarországi Kalendáriumok, 215. 241
Agnes Dukkon, Régi Magyarországi Kalendáriumok, 216.
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III. The Children of the Planets – Scientific, Religious, and Magical
In part due to the translation projects that had begun during the previous two centuries in
Spain, where many astrological works were translated from the Arabic into Latin and then
to other European vernaculars,242
the subjects in many early prints were those same subjects
that had been popular in manuscripts. The fascination with topics in astrology, first in the
Alfonsine courts and then throughout Europe, was joined by the wider public interest when
these same texts were made available in print.
In Augsburg, Erhard Ratdolt for example printed many works by Abû Ma‘shar al-
Balkhi, including the 1488 Flores astrologiae (an abridged Introductorium maius), the
Astrolabium planum of Johannes Angelus, and the 1489 Magnis coniunctionibus (a
translation by Johannes Hispalensis of the Kitāb al-Mawālīd and other writings by Abû
Ma‘shar). The text that was often seen next to calendar cycles of the days of the week and
Children of the Planets in block-books was often an adaptation from Abû Ma‘shar’s
Introductorium maius.
We might ask here how the subjects of early print were understood by their
audience: were they magical, scientific, or religious? If we take into account in this
discussion a broad understanding of religion, we can use this approach as a working
definition for religion. Stanley Tambiah argues that “from a general anthropological
standpoint the distinctive feature of religion as a generic concept lies not in the domain of
belief and its ‘rational accounting’ of the workings of the universe, but in a special
awareness of the transcendent, and acts of symbolic communication that attempt to realize
that awareness and live by its promptings.”243
In this way we can understand why the use of
astrological subjects in block-books and print were combined with ‘religious’ works in the
same volume, because they helped in a practical way to promote the ‘awareness of the
transcendent’ and gave instructions on how to ‘live by its promptings.’ These astrological
242
Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art.” 243
Tambiah, Magic, Science, and Religion, 6.
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subjects were therefore topics of religion as much as biblical meditations. This does not
contradict our description of these subjects as ‘secular’ since we are not putting the
‘religious’ as opposite to secular, but rather distinguishing secular from ‘ecclesiastic.’
Therefore the secular or profane realm can be inhabited by religion, and topics in astrology
can even be found under that heading as well. Tambiah reexamines the terms magic,
religion, and science saying “It is my submission that this emphasis on religion as a system
of beliefs, and the distinction between prayer and spell, the former being associated with
‘religious’ behavior and the latter with ‘magical’ acts, was a Protestant legacy which was
automatically taken over by later Victorian theorists like Tylor and Frazer.”244
If this is the
case then we can say that the readership of the early prints would not have distinguished
what we might now call the ‘magical’ treatise, on astrology from those medical tracts that
made use of spells, or the religious works. This would again explain their presence side by
side in block-books, prints, and manuscripts of the 15th
century. It is a necessary question
then to ask,
If the distinctions between religion and sacramental magic, between prayer and spell,
between sovereign deity and manipulable divine being, were the product of a specific
historical epoch in European history and its particular preoccupations stemming from Judeo-
Christian concepts and concerns, can these same categories (embedded in and stemming
from and historical context) fruitfully serve as universal, analytical categories and illuminate
the texture of other cultures and societies?245
For Tambiah the answer is that we must be continually aware of this historical distinction
because, for the larger populace prior to the Reformation, these categories were very mixed
and would not have been perceived as important in comparison to everyday life rituals and
“practical living.”246
My answer is made clear by the evidence we find in the literature of
the period we are discussing, which reveals that all three of these categories were
participating with each other under one heading of ‘practical knowledge for everyday life.’
244
Tambiah, Magic, Science, and Religion, 19. 245
Tambiah, Magic, Science, and Religion, 20–21. 246
Tambiah, Magic, Science, and Religion, 31.
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If we can theorize as well that the 15th
century individual did not distinguish such
‘secular’ topics from ‘religious’ topics then we can see how the religious and secular
elements were so easily melded together. The 1455 Heidelberger bilderkatechismus (Cod.
Pal. Germ. 438) is one example where astrological texts and fables have been bound
together with Biblia pauperum, Ars moriendi/Totentanz (dance of death). The Biblia
pauperum, as mentioned earlier, gave examples of how certain Old Testament stories should
be read as prophesying occurrences in the New Testament. Ars moriendi were a collection
of six treatises on the subject of how to ‘die well,’ containing for example illustrations of
the five temptations along side prayers and consolations for the dying man. We find along
side these in the Heidelberger bilderkatechismus the Planetenbuch followed by the Aesop’s
fable, “The Sick Lion.” It is when we find on occasion texts that are missing one or the
other, religious or secular, that we first can talk about a real difference perceived. In the
1480 Housebook for example, we do not find any biblical texts along side the astrological
and practical treatise. In the Housebook a treatise on the Ars memoriam is followed by a
series of the planets and their children. These sophisticated illustrations by the unknown
“Master of the Housebook” (probably in actuality three skilled illustrators) are those well-
known examples that have made this motif familiar to our modern audience. This
housebook (hence the title given to the manuscript) must have been designed for someone
who had diverse interest reflected, in addition to these treatises on memory and astrology,
by tracts on metallurgy, castle defense design, and medicine. Also in the 1568 Ständebuch
(Book of Trades) or the 1459 Fechtbuch (Fight-book) we see texts dedicated solely to
professions or warfare, lacking ecclesiastical contents. This transition might indicate if not a
preference for some readers in ‘everyday life’ topics over a more overtly religious topic, at
least a trend toward separating or expanding what topics were appropriate for publication
and readership. By allowing ‘everyday life’ into the libraries and early printing workshops,
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an unintentional peeling apart of the religious and secular realms was taking place in the
15th
century.
The transition in the 15th
century from manuscript to print was tied to developments
in subject matter that reflects the mentality of an expanding audience. Print made texts that
were once available only to the clerical and aristocratic realms available to a wider
audience. This gave a wider range of individuals the ability to interpret original texts for
themselves. Because printing made use of vernaculars, it put the text itself into the hands of
the individual, allowing them to make up their own mind on how it should be interpreted.
Early print was largely about interpretation. As was stated earlier in this chapter, the most
popular early prints were “commentaries” on the Bible. Commentaries, summaries, and
abridgements on other topics as well, such as astrology and medicine, were also common.
Print was one of the most important factors in making possible new forms of interpretation.
In this way, coming before the reform movements of the 16th
century, though unaware, it
was one of the early factors of secularization. Moreover, many block-books combined
astrological knowledge with religious and practical literatures and reflected the interest and
inclusive approach toward their diverse subjects that their readers maintained. The topics
found together in block-books and printed works before 1500, that would later become
separated and classified as secular, religious, or scientific, were seen as congruent in their
milieu. The housebooks of the 15th
century are definitive in their contents of what their
owners found to be useful knowledge, thus showing the beginnings of a genre in the earliest
printed works that was oriented toward everyday life.
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Conclusion
“The Problem of the Planet Children”
My express goal in this thesis was to show that the Children of the Planets motif puts into
iconography a new form of astrological thinking that emerged at the beginning of the 15th
century. Where we can only trace the motif as far back as its earliest examples, we must
then ask the question “What is the philosophical stance that Children of the Planets tries to
portray?” I would say that it portrays the idea that the individual is interconnected with a
cosmos, is part of it in the same way that the planets are, and in that way can become an
active principle in determining the course of his/her own life. This way of thinking offers a
solution to the determinism of astrology and places free will in accordance with providence
by allowing the individual to choose from a number a beneficial paths toward right living.
This new philosophical stance was a result of a synthesis of ideas and elements that were
acquired during the development of planet iconography in the Middle Ages, culminating in
the 15th
century. It was only in the 15th
century that: 1) the Children of the Planets appeared
for the first time in manuscripts, alongside text, 2) that manuscript illumination reached a
peak in development, 3) which was simultaneous to the onset of print, 4) where we saw a
revival of astrology, and 5) prisca theologia gain popularity.
All this was accompanied by a focus on everyday life, health, medicine, and the
beginnings of an inadvertent movement into the private sphere. The inklings of this
movement provided the palette for the Children of the Planets which is a meeting of
everyday life and an astrological formula. The Children of the Planets was a reference tool,
a calendar used to understand basic concepts about astrology, one’s sign, one’s ruling
planet. It was also a way to catalogue an individual amongst the group, where each person
could find his place of belonging in the society, through his placement in a guild or
profession or character based on the illustration. By being able to identify with a social
group, the motif functioned as a social tool as well. It was, of course, a divinatory tool as
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well, where basic characteristics of one’s future could be observed depending on the date of
birth.
Most importantly the Children of the Planets provided a choice. It offered options
for its viewer, i.e., which of various possibilities to emulate and ascribe to. Philosophically
it offered a way for free will to operate among providence and astrological determinism.
Each person in this way was bound to a planet by birth, and by communing with the
celestials, through daily interaction, one could match the influence of the stars over his own
destiny.
In his first publication on the Children of the Planets motif, Fritz Saxl originally
asked four questions in his article “Probleme Der Planetenkinderbilder” (Problems of the
Planet Children Images):
1. Where is the home of planet children representations?
2. Their relation to the Orient.
3. On which texts are they based?
4. Filiation of the representations.247
He answered at least the last of these. His catalogues of astrological motifs and the
categorization described there are still used today. As far as what texts they were based on,
he could not point to any one single specific work which the images illustrated exactly, but
instead entertained their genealogy as an independent visual motif. He could say that the
text that accompanied the Children of the Planets was often derived from Abû Ma‘shar’s
Introductorium maius. How they were related to Oriental manuscripts he never fully was
able to explain. His guess was that the frescos in the Palazzo della Ragione had somehow
informed the motif in Italy, and that these images had come to us through an earlier
manuscript that would have been the predecessor to the Kitāb al-Bulhān, or images in an
247
Fritz Saxl, “Probleme der Planetenkindebilder,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt 48 (1919): 1013–1021. This
is a review of Anton Hauber, Planetenkinderbilder und zur Geschichte des menschlichen Glaubens und Irrens
(Strasbourg: Heitz, 1916). English translation here by Thomas Szerecz.
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illustrated version of the Picatrix, which had been derived from the Sabbians of Harran. But
the Kraków Picatrix did not bear the evidence of having spent any time in the East, and
there were large distances between the examples in this theory. The question of their origins
he traced to their earliest examples in Western manuscripts, in Christine d’Pisan’s Épître
d’Othéa (1407), and to the Kitāb al-Bulhān (1399), produced in Baghdad, but he never
found any earlier examples in manuscripts so the details of their transmission were left a
mystery.
My question throughout this work has been not just about where they came from,
but also why did they only appear and become so popular only at this time? I think a
philosophical change in the understanding of astrology was occurring, and that is what
caused the motif to occur simultaneously in distant places, leading to a blossoming in the
early modern period. Where we run out of examples, the logical step to take is to turn to the
philosophical dimensions. From this perspective we broaden the scope, and can look at the
unanswered questions about the details of the motif.
The philosophical dimension of the Children of the Planets is expressed in Marsilio
Ficino’s De vita coelitis comparanda. There we see how Ficino marries a particular
understanding of astrology to Christianity, and proposes its use in everyday life. Its practice
can lead the individual ultimately to achieving a self-perfection, a goal that we see reflected
in the Picatrix. In the Picatrix as well as in Ficino the ability to contact perfect nature is
aided by intermediary beings, the planets and individual daemons. In the student of Ficino,
Pico della Mirandola, we do not find this same need, because there man himself becomes
the intermediary.
The astronomical context from which the Children of the Planets are born is
Ptolemaic, and its astrological counterpart is in large part found in the writings of Abû
Ma‘shar. In the early examples we have of the motif we can observe at least two different
formats. In the Kitāb al-Bulhān, the planets and children are seen in a graph form, 7 X 8
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squares containing the planets and the planet children, from right to left. In the Christine de
Pisan examples the planet figure is seen above in a nimbus while the children are below, in
a line. But those images that are most likely to come to mind when we think of the Children
of the Planets are not strictly in either of these formats, but show instead a blending of
figures and the interaction of planets and children, as in the Housebook. In the early
woodcuts and blockbooks we can even see some of this communication between the central
celestial figures of the planet and the Zodiacs with the rest of the figures. The ratios are
closer between planet and children, much like in the Liber astrologiae images.
When we are looking for individual ‘planet children’ we see resemblances to the
figures in the Kraków Picatrix and the Spanish Picatrix (Vaticanus Reginensis 1283).
Details about how the artists of the manuscripts chose to portray this text can still be
discovered, as we have seen in the case of the figure of Mars, which had its own variation in
the image based on a different interpretation of the text. In the transition from print to
manuscript we see individual figures transferred from manuscript to print which we can
compare, and which retain the same form in many different places. We find the planets
riding on the backs of different animals in these examples of the Picatrix which resemble
those models in later imagery of the Children of the Planets, as in the central planet figures
in the Housebook. Finally, the Children of the Planets are among the first images to be
printed. Print eventually puts the Children of the Planets into the private sphere. There it
becomes a household item, and functions alongside other useful literatures as a daily
reference tool.
There is an intriguing connection, hinted at by the similarity to images in the
Losbuch and German Children of the Planets manuscripts, or between the Kitāb al-Bulhān
and the images of the Falnama, in that we know the Children of the Planets could be used
as a divinatory tool. We can argue that these types of books should be classified under one
genre. These types of books, ‘oracle books,’ and the manuscripts that the Children of the
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Planets are found in were specifically using images imbedded in the text as independent
artifacts of divination. The book as a whole was a magical artifact, and the images in
particular imparted the divination.
The importance of reevaluating and expanding the approach to the methodology
surrounding the research on the Children of the Planets is evidenced by the many questions
that remain. We can still investigate further comparisions between the examples of the motif
that we have, especially in some less studied examples, as in the additional planet children
series found in the Modena, Housebook, and Splendor Solis manuscripts. But more
importantly we must entertain further philosophical approaches to the images. This is in part
an extension of the suggestion made at one time by Aby Warburg that anthropological
methodologies should be added to art historical methods of investigating iconography.
Giorgio Agamben writes that for Warburg “iconography was never an end in
itself…Warburg’s use of iconography always transcends the mere identification of a subject
and its sources.”248
It was Warburg who first called attention to the need for a
“methodological amplification of the thematic and geographical borders” of art history,
pointing to the new approach he had taken in the analysis of the Schifanoia frescos, that
recognized “that antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern age are in fact one interrelated
epoch.”249
Questions to address with further opportunity and time would naturally gravitate
towards in-depth analysis and comparison of the printed examples of the Children of the
Planets, specifically in the different printing centers throughout Europe, from Italian and
German, to Hungarian, Polish, and Bohemian examples. It remains a task for future studies
on this topic. One of the more difficult tasks that must be addressed in the studies of the
Children of the Planets is the uncovering of further examples in Oriental manuscripts. The
248
Giorgio Agamben, “Warburg and the Nameless Science” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy,
ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999/2000), 92. 249
Agamben is quoting Warburg here (see Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the
Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara”). Giorgio Agamben, “Warburg and the Nameless Science,” 92.
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need for this was pointed to not only by Saxl and Rice early on, but more recently by Baer
and Carboni as well. That we still have only three examples in Islamic manuscripts is not
due to their lack of existence, but simply that there are not enough scholars researching this
field. At this point, though, a similarity in the page layouts between the early examples of
the Children of the Planets and other astrological motifs in manuscripts, prior to the 1407
Épître d’Othéa and the 1399 Kitāb al-Bulhān, is a promising lead.
The Children of the Planets as a motif and as a philosophical approach embody and
understanding of astrology that attempts to bring the human and divine atmospheres closer
together. The ‘children’ are witnesses to the time period that they were created in, but their
relevance to the early modern era is superlative. They offer a new way of handling texts and
images, which puts the readers and viewers in a closer relationship to the book itself. A
synthesis of ideas and a meeting of cultures in their formations has created their distinct
form, and their ability to act as interpreters between everyday life and the divine sphere is
what makes them an art form and an artifact of religious and scientific histories.
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BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Manuscripts
Undated. Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm. Cairo. M. Nasar. Private Collection.
11th
c. Cod. Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek. MS Lat. 5.
12th
c. Germanicus. Aratos. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional. MS 19 [16].
1280 ca. Qazwini. Ajā'ib al-makhl qāt wa gharā'ib al-mawj dāt. Cod. Monacensis 464.
13th
c. Vaticanus Reginensis. Vatican Library. Reg. lat. 1283a.
1340 ca. Michael Scotus. Liber introductorius. Munich, Bayrische Staatsbibliothek. CLM
10268 fol. 85r.
1399 Kitāb al-Bulhān. [Baghdad.] Oxford, Bodleian. MS Or. 133.
14th
c. Astrological ms. Incl. Kitâb al-Mawalid. [Tabriz or Baghdad.] London, Keir
Collection.
14th
c. Al-Magrithi. Kitab Thakhirat al-Iskandar. MS Biblioteca Escorial.
14th
c. Abû Ma‘shar. Kitâb al-Mawalid. Paris, BNF, MS arabe 2583.
14th
c. Fendulus. Liber astrologiae. London, British Library. Sloane 3983, f. 32r-49v.
14th
c. Losbuch. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Codex vindobonensis ser. nov.
2652.
1403 ca. Boccaccio. De claris mulieribus. Paris, BNF. MS fr. 598, fol. 13r.
1407 Christine de Pisan. Épître d’Othéa. BNF MS fr. 606.
1445 Kassel manuscript (Passauer Calendar). Kassel, Universitäts Biblio. 2° Ms. astron. 1.
1458 ca. Kraków Picatrix. Cracow, Biblioteka Jagiellońska. BJ 793.
1460 De Sphaera (ill. Cristoforo de Perdis). Modena, Biblioteca Estense. Lat. 202.
1475 Tübinger Hausbuch (ill. Joseph of Ulm). Tübingen Library. UB M. d. 2.
1480 Housebook. Waldburg Wolfegg/ Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Schloss Wolfegg. Private
Collection.
1483 Johannes Sacrobosco. Liber introductorius. [Leipzig.] New York, Morgan. MS 384, f.
28v-32r.
1491 Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch. [Regensburg.] Heidelberg, Universitäts Biblio. Cod.
Pal. Germ. 832, 98v-101v.
15th
c. Fendulus. Liber astrologiae. Paris, BNF. MS lat. 7344.
15th
c. Boke of Astronomy and off Philosophye'. Oxford, Bodl. Rawl. D 1220 (English).
15th
c. Scotus. Liber introductorius. Oxford. MS Bodl. 266. Oxford
15th
c. Michael Scotus. Liber introductorius. Munich, Bayrische Staatsbibliothek, CLM
10268.
15th
c. Angelus. Astrolabium planum. Budapest, National Széchenyi Library. Germ. 2, f.
20v; C, f. 101v.
1531 ca. Splendor Solis. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen. Cod. 78 D 3.
1582 Splendor Solis. London, British Museum. Harl. MS 3469.
1582 Kitāb al-maṭāli‘ al-sa‘āda wa-yanābī‘ al-Sayyāda. Paris, BNF. Suppl. Turc. 242.
1582 Kitāb al-maṭāli‘ al-sa‘āda wa-yanābī‘ al-Sayyāda. New York, Morgan. M. 788.
1580s Falnama [Iran.] Istanbul, Topkapi Palace Museum. H. 1703. Fol. 30b, 17b.
16th
c. Treatise on stones (ref. Ghayat). Paris, BNF. MS arabe 2775.
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Early Prints
1455 ca. Planetenbuch. Heidelberger Bilderkatechismus. Heidelberg, Universitäts Biblio.
Cod. Pal. Germ. 438, 149r–150v.
1460 Baccio Baldini. ‘Children of the Planets.’ Pavia, Museo Civico.
1460 London Block-Book. London, British Library. I A 27.
1460 Basel Block-Book, Basel, Öffentliche Bibliothek. A N V 37a.
1470 Wirkungen der Planeten Block-Book. New York, Granger Collection.
1470 Berlin Block-Book, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen.
1488 Flores astrologiae. Augsburg, Erhard Ratdolt.
1488 Abû Ma‘shar. Introductorium maius. Augsburg, Erhard Ratdolt.
1488 Johannes Angelus. Astrolabium planum. Augsburg, Erhard Ratdolt.
1488 Abû Ma‘shar. Flores astrologiae. Venice, Johannes Baptista Sessa.
1489 Magnis coniunctionibus. Augsburg, Erhard Ratdolt.
15th
c. Copenhagen Block-Book, Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, Det kongelige
Bibliotek.
15th
c. Vienna Block-Book. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Ink.2.d.4.
15th
c. Schwabach Block-Book. Schwabach, Kirchen-Kapetelsbibliotek.
1510 Jörg Breu the Elder. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen.
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